buro angla

The future is an apathetic void

2010-12-16T13:54:00.002+05:30

No Birds This Winter

2010-12-13T23:05:00.006+05:30

Once upon a time, in times such as these, migratory birds used to come to this city. You could see them everywhere: around the marshes and ponds, the grassy fields where kids used to play football, atop the branches of the trees struggling to breath in these confused, confused spaces of mud, grime, and concrete, fleeing from the harsh winters of the north.

The birds have stopped coming to Kolkata city once these spaces have disappeared. And in the few places that are left; the birds have stopped coming.

Yesterday, I was at the National Library, and after few hours of reading, I decided to visit the Zoo all of a sudden. There were the usual crowds, the hawkers selling badaam, the monkeys crying for attention, the tigers and lions sulking in their dark cages. The last time I visited the zoo was in winter, years and years ago. Now, Bengalees in stiff-necked sweaters and jackets, a pleasant wind from the north, mufflers on kids running around with balloons, reminded me that winter was 'officially' here. I watched a few couples smooching on the benches; I walked past a few old men who had wandered into the zoo like me, aimless and undecided about what to do next. But I missed the birds of my childhood memories: free uncaged birds from distant lands who once came to this city and the zoo to revisit life. What is it about, what is in the air that makes me feel so nostalgic? Everything around me now seemed to wear a melancholy look: and there were no free birds about this winter. Or perhaps, I had failed to spot them...

Time to remember Johnny Sokko and his flying robot

2010-11-11T00:12:00.010+05:30

We came into this world when all the old and serious ideologies were either dead or had transformed themselves into churches with their own fine-combed distinctions. We were to learn it later. We came into the world of a post-liberalisation India long before when Remo Fernandes and Juhi Chawla danced their hats off and told us to stick bottles of Lehar Pepsi up our butts, and forget everything. The TV was then a blue tube enclosed in shutters and standing on wobbly legs: the thunder cats quivered on the screen as a light breeze shook the antennae on the terrace. But smart and feisty Johnny Sokko ruled our world, fighting monsters, godzillas, and evil scientists with a violence that always seems to attract children.

"Robot, robot", I used to whisper earnestly to the invisible matchbox tied to my wrist with a string. It was always the Johhny Sokko watch. "Grrrr" went the robot and "Swisssh!" he fired a missile off his gingerly fingers. He always used to grow new fingers. And then there was me playing the robot. And me was not alone. It was we who played the robot.

I did not know then it was a Japanese TV series of the sixties run twenty years later in a country that was "closed", and where the children were getting used to a society that did not know where the hell it was going. It still doesn't know. Neither do we know what happened to that confused childhood that was severely constrained in space and time by aliens of the bad planet of the adults. But as I write these lines, I know that in a way it is that which keeps us going. We're all tied to our times, but there's always a magic watch summoning us through the hazes and mists of the knowledgeable world, through serious and complex analyses, to a time when imagination represented what we are, and what we will be...

Ah, I'm stoopid philosophising again.

Rough Notes on Nandigram

2010-10-25T20:29:00.004+05:30

This is an incomplete graphic narrative I was working on in 2007, when peasants were being killed at Nandigram by the West Bengal government. I had planned a narrative, in the comics format, as how land acquisition takes place in India, and the realities of corporate globalisation. I stopped working on it after a few pages were done, and could never return to it.

Looking at it now, I feel it's rather text-heavy, and has a lot of glitches which I feel like correcting. However, and because it records a disturbing time, I've left things as they are: born in the moment where we think we ought to have done something!

Rough Notes on Nandigram

Vague traces

2010-09-24T20:13:00.004+05:30

Vague traces of childhood return to haunt. You feel miserable and low.

You sit for hours looking at the blank pulse of the electronic screen, addicted to shifting words and misshapen soundscapes. Images watched with red, listless eyes. You know there's no changing the past. The past decayed, and then melted away. The present is an empty waiting for the correct words to form. And no matter what old Althu said, even the future doesn't seem to last forever.

You realise that 'justice' you'd learned about in school and the academy has nothing to do with right or wrong. It is just used to justify the arrogance of power. Once you kept asking yourself why. Now you don't. The same goes with 'freedom'. No one learns freedom by rote and you cannot do a thing. Just watch the whole thing happen, just stand there firm, bleeding deep inside. If someone asks, tell them freedom cannot be had through rations.

It's just like you to find a spot like this. Here you've already failed your own dreams once. You won't probably qualify for other dreams the next year either. Your skepticism will be construed as conspiratorial. You'll just provide them with some information and emotions they can never process. And you'll be back here in two years' time saying "Yes, I'm fine, thank you..." to someone or the other, when you didn't mean that at all.

But you'll never forget. Like stale tea from inside a thermos, believe me, you'll be okay.

If someone is still listening to this rambling talk, here's an old favourite song of mine, sung before it got famous, and the singer was still nineteen.

The oldest game

2010-08-14T01:07:00.001+05:30

Choronzon: "I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds … of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"

Dream: "I am hope."

-Choronzon and Dream, playing the oldest game, in A Hope in Hell (Sandman #4).

Constructions of History

2010-07-24T00:30:00.006+05:30

"The constructions of history are comparable to military orders that discipline the true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history which demands 'empathy,' which makes everything abstract."

- Walter Benjamin [The Archades Project]

The best way to organise ebooks, notes, & references for your PhD

2010-07-04T13:06:00.030+05:30

Surely, I do not mean "the" best way. The best way is for you to find out, one and/or the combinations that suits you the most.

Here, I share the best way that works for me- a technological noob on the humanities' side, who doesn't know and doesn't have time to work and think over complex codes that make your work really easy. I'm a lazy bug who for some strange reasons has to complete a humanities thesis in the space of a year. (If you're only looking for the best software to manage your ebooks, close your eyes, and download Calibre. Though with it, as with any other, you have to spend hours attaching tags to the books and files you once stored in different folders. And if you really do have the time to systematise your study, I suggest you can use the quotation manager TextCite, and make a good use of its category functions to organise your reading notes.)

My intention here is different. I am disorganised to the extent that the effort and time that goes into my attempted writing of a PhD dissertation makes it impossible for wander beyond my writing, for the time being, or to systematically organise my ebooks for purposes other than that of writing. So what I tell you here might come of help if you're working against a deadline, and your technological capabilities like mine doesn't go beyond a little typing skills in MS Word.

The sublime object of Bibliography

For some time I have been looking for a way to refer to my modest collection of about 10 GB of ebooks in pdf, html, djvu and other formats; about 5GB of journal articles and randomly scribbled notes in MS Word. And I've been trying to access these for the last two weeks to write a chapter of about 20,000 words, and the footnote entries stand as of now at 178, with a book or an article to cite for most. I had to do this following one of the the humanities styles listed by the Chicago Manual of Style, and I found the manual entering of citations is really a pain in the ass, especially when you've to concentrate on the writing, and at the same time, look for the obscure useless book stored somewhere in your hard drive that you've read and which exists for no worthy purposes beyond the cursory citation. This made me look for two things: a organiser of ebooks and articles that is (and importantly) a bibliographic citation manager. Like an idiot, the first thing I turned to was EndNote.

Managing Citations and the complex world of Citation Managers

After playing with EndNote for a week, I realised this was not for me. It's expensive: from where does a third world 'researcher' procure $ 300, and pay additional shipping charges, apart from the why of it? And perhaps with the reasons to do with its price, EndNote's interface is confusing for the uninitiated (read someone whose university doesn't have a commercial tie-up with the company). Another of my objections is that EndNote created more problems in terms of storage, unless you constantly upgraded your stuff. Even without upgrading, EndNote sucks. For example, if you've a desktop running on Windows XP with Word2003 installed, and a laptop with Windows 7 with Word2007 installed, and use a USB stick between the two for small file transfers, there's no simple way to migrate your bibliographic data, insert and cite (their 'Cite While You Write' function) from the same EndNote file in which you've once stored your citations. And after an endless session of scanning their tutorial videos, their forums, and googling solutions as how to get rid of the "invalid class string" message that appears every time I try to insert a citation from EndNote to Word, I decided that I had enough.

I tried Zotero for a few days, the free and open source add-on for the Firefox browser. While it worked good for synchronising notes taken from the web, there was no going beyond the proverbial Firefox way of crashing. I usually take a long smoking break when my favourite Firefox crashes, but this was a bit more. Zotero crashed everytime I tried to append a pdf ebook to it from my hard discs, and a number of times, without any provocation. I almost got lung cancer!

And for a day and two after that, I tried using Mendeley. As an offline and web-based hybrid citation manager, Mendeley too was free and excellent in terms of its management of books, articles, and citations, and the way it effortlessly scanned my library and fetched names, etc. off the files, and also made the insertion of citations in Word very easy. If you're planning a shorter work (let's say a journal article), Mendeley should be the obvious choice. For longer works though, I'm skeptical about Mendeley on two counts. One, synchronization between the offline version and the online Mendeley account of yours takes hours, especially if you live on slow internet connections in the southern hemisphere. Two, its free online storage capability is only 500 MB (you've to pay to "upgrade" your storage), which plays one of the older tricks of proprietary software industry's money-making.

It was at this point, I was on the verge of frustration, and almost decided to go back to the manual entry process in MS Word. I was and am wary of open source: who doesn't know that what the geeks call "really simple", really requires hours and hours of unfruitful scripting for the technologically incompetent such as me? But I thought I would try at least one. And I'm happy that I did, I found one that didn't make me look back.

I found JabRef . And my ecstatic advice to you: If you're looking for one that makes your work easy, try JabRef- the best bibliography manager for the present. The best thing for JabRef is that it easy for the first-time user and uncomplicated. It takes at the most 10-15 minutes to learn. Moreover, it is consistent than EndNote, or the word citation manager that comes default in MS Word 2007; it is so because the techies say JabRef is based on BibTeX. And finally it always free to try, and improve on (if you are into coding), because it is open source.

How JabRef works

Once you download and install it, you open JabRef, create a database, and click the green (+) sign for a new entry. (BTW, you have to have Java installed on your computer. If you don't have it, get it from here).

There appear simple fields to insert your bibliographical data and linking facilities to either files in your computer or on the web. It's really that simple! And this YouTube video below explains most of the rest:

I found out that I can easily customise on the input fields for the bibliographic entry. And if you require more variations on the Chicago style using JabRef, they don't come by default with the JabRef software. But you can easily download an excellent plug-in (developed by Juan Jose Baldrich) called "Chicago Manual of Style export filters" (check here for the English version). Download the plug-in and install it in the following steps:

JabRef>Plugins> Plugin Manager> Install Plugin

Once you've installed the plug-in, you can export your entire bibliography (or select entries) in a rich text format (.rtf) file that opens in MS Word with your citations arranged according to your preference following the Chicago manual.

Also if you're lazy like me to desire a set of insert buttons in MS Word that automatically insert a citation, or create a bibliography on the document in which you are working, you can do that with JabRef. For that, you just have to install two other pieces of free software: the basic version of a word-processing package called MikTeX (available here) and the Word-integration software called Bibtex4Word (available here). The developer of Bibtex4Word has put up a very comprehensible step-by-step installation instruction here, and you can refer to it if you have problems installing. (As I've found out, with JabRef running, Bibtex4Word works perfectly with Word 2003 and Word 2007). Again the chicago style doesn't come by default, but you can download it (and numerous other sytles) off the MikTeX site by going through the following steps and choosing:

Your Computer's Start Menu>All Programs> MikTeX>Maintenance>Package Manager> chicago or chicago-annote (you find these by scrolling down the entries on the left side of your screen). Select chicago-annote and click the install (+) button.

Once done, you can integrate JabRef with MS Word to seamlessly insert your citations in your manuscript, and to look up ebooks, articles, and links inside the same window. It really saves time; believe me!

Eternity, Bathroom, Smoke and Spiders

2009-10-11T03:13:00.005+05:30

"Men always represent eternity as an incomprehensible idea, as a something immense- immense! But why should this necessarily be the case? Imagine, on the contrary, a small room- a bathroom, if you will- blackened by smoke, with spiders in every corner."

-Arcadius Ivanovitch in Crime and Punishment.

Being Caliban

2009-09-14T00:55:00.013+05:30

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he asked disapprovingly, looking at the books on my bookshelf. I was shocked: this was the first time I had come across such reverse Orientalism; albeit a politically-correct one.

We were having a rather irritating debate on 'continuity' and 'rupture' two days after that.

This young French anthropologist was trying to say the more things change, the more things remain the same. Yes, I said, but it depends on the position in time, space, and culture that you belong to, or assume. To an epithelial and alien anthropologist watching earth over an alien telescope for ten thousand years, it's the continuation of a species over numerous insignificant events. To Foucault, the Islamic 'Revolution' of 1978 in Iran was a rupture.

We differed sharply on the question of 'choice'.

He said: The middle classes largely control what is called 'culture'. They are to blame for consciously choosing on every point on shopping malls, consumerism, cars, and everything that goes with the logic of the market: they consciously choose that everyday, every moment, when they share small bits of power against the relatively powerless.

I said: The middle classes, at least here, are now primarily shaped by social conditions that make them devoid of 'history' in the older sense. Apart from those rooted to older ways of tradition (those disappearing ones who still preserve the classical educationist's vision of, say, listening to Mozart and speaking the Queen's English measure meticulously on a Nesfield grammar book), most ape and synthesize according to local customs and cultural moorings (for aping is also an act of synthesis) the products spawned by what Adorno and Horkheimer had simplistically tried to pin as the "culture industry".

The question of blame be better left to those higher-up in the fields of concentrated power —those running, funding and controlling the globalised networked shows of power and domination. An individual belonging to the middle classes can only be criticised when he is aware of the range of possibilities that constitute his 'choice'. I don't blame a person for buying a branded jeans from a supermarket; I criticize him for not knowing that jeans is the fruit of sweatshop slave trade. And I, specifically blame him when, for example, he pretends to ignore that the person sitting next to him has fallen sick and needs taken to a hospital. That is, he can be explicitly blamed only when he's aware of the choice he is to make as an individual, and then choose the ethically wrong one... I was going on to speak of Max Stirner's view on the topic, but then I stopped talking all of a sudden.

I found out that I was rather rude when debating with him, and I wondered why was it so. I'm usually not that rude, and I've been a patient debater in other situations, more disconcerting and hostile. What was it that had unsettled me? And then I remembered his question.

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he had asked.

The question was sickening. And I couldn't answer him without being angry; angry at him for being a white man with a not-so-innocuous question. A long time back in the university, a professor had told us: 'There's a Caliban somewhere deep inside you. You'll always find him when time comes."

You can't answer the question without being Caliban. Prospero's spirits hear you and yet you need must curse!

I pay out my line

2009-08-28T18:57:00.001+05:30

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand, you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible of course.

I pay out my line, I say out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page."

- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 2000.

Youth

2009-07-01T00:05:00.012+05:30

A young couple pose for a photo in front of
Jinshui Bridge in Tian'anmen Square, Beijing, on March 23, 2009.

Student protestors struggle with soldiers from the Chinese Army,
the PLA, at Tian'anmen Square, on June 3, 1989.

Both the pictures share two common features: youth and Tian'anmen Square.
No points for guessing the difference.

Incidentally, this month marked the 20th anniversary of the Tian'anmen Square Protests.
Mourn. Celebrate. Remember.

(Pix Credits: The first is from The China Daily, a showcase of photographs by 100 photographers, part of the 'Chinese Revolution's 60 years celebration that is coming soon. The second is from the Asian history section of About.com which records the butchering of student protesters by the PLA. )

'Any Where Out of This World!'

2009-05-21T02:09:00.001+05:30

"This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window."

- Baudelaire, 'Any Where Out of This World!'

"Remember When"- Sharing is Caring

2009-05-04T01:01:00.016+05:30

In this world of webs, deceptions, and sickening credit-carded entertainments, and where strangers walk the nights of the ether in their wakeful solitude, it's rather strange that the act of sharing survives. It's made up of one of the oldest and noble human sentiments that made us humans, and it's still the only act that makes you feel alive, at least on the net.

Sharing. An act of courage and extreme gentleness that survives the hostility of governments, and other rabid censors of free expression.

Imagine a world without the silent uploader, her pirate eyes alight with the warmth of the incandescent cathode ray screen, spending sleepless nights to share a movie, an album, a book she knows you're sure to appreciate.

Imagine a world without the patient seeders on the portals who seed and seed for years, risking their systems to known armadas and unknown hostilities, and planting new trees of hope in every island of a recalcitrant computer connecting to this nether regions.

Or imagine a world without trees.

Yes, trees and photosynthetic life forms and images that survive and blossom inspite of a million leeches who've never bothered to put a decent "thank you" comment on a post. They nod in silence, share light and oxygen, lifting their branches and leaves up into the ultramarine sky and breathe life everywhere, and right now, as you're reading this, they weave life in all its varieties.

Listen carefully. Let me whisper it once more in your ears. "Sharing is caring."
And gentle reader, remember it well.

What follows is a Not-Copyright Comics on the "piracy" issue by Dylan Horrocks, a wonderful artist from New Zealand:
(Click on the image for a better view)

Miraculous and sacred stoopidity

2009-04-09T14:30:00.010+05:30

Growl! I received that mail for the umpteenth time! Earlier I had it from MBAs, corporate executives, NGO scions, smart-ass journalists, and from postgraduate people whose CVs exhibit a dose of 'liberal humanistic education' comprising Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Marx, Foucault, and also all that post-colonial shit.

After a never-ending list of people it is forwarded to, you get to see a picture of a grim-faced deity (I guess of Tamil origin) and a message drafted and highlighted in red and blue by someone who hadn't learnt elementary grammar in primary school.

Class 1 Officer of Indian government received this picture and called it 'junk mail', 8 days later his husband died. A man received this picture and immediately sent out copies...his surprise was winning the 10 crore rupees & promotion in job

T. Ratan received this picture, gave it to his secretary to make copies but they forgot to distribute: she lost her job and he lost his family.

This picture is miraculous and sacred, don't forget to forward this within 1 days to at least 20 people. Do Not Forget to forward and you will receive a huge surprise!!

My usual response had been:

I happen to be an atheist, and I don't believe in luck.
Please refrain in sending me these kinds of stoopid messages in the future, or you might make your goddess really angry. Thanks :)

Or sometimes I had come out sarcastic:

I had lost my brand new Nataraj pencil last week. A Persian god and a Scandanavian god appeared in my dream, and asked me to send it to you and ten other stoopid people who believe that they'll have a box of crayons soon by forwarding this mail.

Don't ignore this mail, or the wrath of 10, 000 Tibetan and Malaysian gods will fall on you. Amen.

But these deeply religious and mortally afraid people have refused to relent. I wish I could send something materially hard (like a bamboo with nails sticking out of it) to the original sender of this mail, without hurting his religious sentiment, so that the person could shove it up his ass, and stay put in religious serenity. Things like that are not possible in a secular state of things, I know. But the wish grows stronger by the day.

Nowhere to go

2009-04-03T15:24:00.003+05:30

And in another land and time, a Marmdadoff tells a schismatic student who might not be Raskolnikoff:
"Can you understand, sir, what it means to have nowhere to go to? You don't? Don't realise that yet?"

Writing is a con

2009-03-30T17:40:00.002+05:30

Any child can see that the map is not the ground. You cannot make a “reliable” map. A map, like a scientific theory, or consciousness itself, is no more than a dream of control. The conscious mind operates at forty or fifty bits a second, and disorder is infinitely deep. Better admit that. Better lie back and enjoy it—especially since, without the processes implied by it, no one could write (or read) books anyway. Writing is a con.

- M. John Harrison (what it might be to live in viriconium, 2001)

Quotes from "Upside down"

2009-03-21T10:07:00.004+05:30

"Today, there are certain things one can't say in the face of public opinion:
* capitalism wears the stage name "market economy"
* imperialism is called "globalization"
* the victims of imperialism are called "developing countries," much as a dwarf might be called a "child"
* opportunism is called "pragmatism"
* treason is called "realism"
* poor people are called "low-income people"
* the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the " dropout rate"
* the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called "a flexible labor market"
* official rhetoric acknowledges women's rights among those of "minorities," as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority
* instead of military dictatorship, people say "process"
* torture is called "illegal compulsion" or "physical and psychological pressure"
* when thieves belong to a good family they're "kleptomaniacs"
* the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of "illicit enrichment"
* " accidents" are what they call crimes committed by cars
* for the blind, they say "the unseeing"
* a black man is "a man of color"
* where it says "long and difficult illness," it means cancer or AIDS
* "sudden illness" means heart attack
* people annihilated in military operations aren't dead: those killed in battle are "casualties," and civilians who get it are "collateral damage"
* in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, "I don't like that word 'bomb.' They aren't bombs. They're exploding artifacts"
* "Getting Along" is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia
* "Dignity" was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while "Liberty" was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship
* "Peace and Justice" is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico."

[Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world, Eduardo Galeano (2000: 40)]

Utopia, toothache, and Orwell's diaries

2009-03-08T12:13:00.012+05:30

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

- George Orwell ['Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun,' Dec, 1943]

I have recently come across a wonderful online project that blogs live entries from Orwell's diaries, seventy years removed in time.

The act of putting up Orwell's personal notes in a real time cyberspace blog creates a strange of contemporaneity, and simultaneously, makes us feel less solitary in an acutely amnesiac world. You see nesting storks, goats on a mountain climb, carcasses of dead donkeys, herons, ibises, and also meet interesting ordinary plain people in Morocco whom the world has forgotten, while the news of the fall of Barcelona comes in.

A few centuries back, this man would have been one of the most famous prophets, and probably crucified, burnt at the stakes, his limbs torn apart, etc. The greatest and wickedest discovery of the previous century, though, was that the integrity of a person can reduced to cinders if you're capable of desenstivising minds to make all words inane and unrecognisable. We lack the training and the circumstances to feel and caress words and feelings, and we've been trained to unlearn our social memories by our gods and masters. But journeying with Orwell is more than a pleasure. It's delight in the sense that words only can convey.

If anyone is interested, here's the link to the Orwell Project.

There is a crack in everything

2009-02-03T12:14:00.003+05:30

The anthem concludes:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

- Cohen ('Anthem,' The Future, 1992)

Slumdog, caramba, and an old ad jingle

2009-01-24T08:36:00.016+05:30

In the search for superlatives, the limits of sense and decency have long been passed. Did you ever think a person living in the Mumbai slums could be so lovingly called a 'slumdog' in the yankee fashion in print and the boom, and everyone would celebrate the triumph of this repulsive rags-to-riches story with obcene hurrahs, and people not even being slightly uncomfortable with the word?

"Woof! Woof! This is all so boring!"

Sigh, the Indian advertisement industry too has ceased to manufacture simple wish-fulfillment messages: of a TV that made your neighbours green with envy, a red soap that could be used alternately as a brick and a magic token for winning football matches, a scooter that 'united' India, or simply those 'amazing whiteness'-inspiring detergent powders of Lalitaji and (oh ho!) Deepikaji that lost their appeal once the publick took to mall-visiting sprees, and chucked all their old clothes out somewhere.

But these are remembrances of things past, and no one can be forced to read Proust anymore.

I was inside a ramshackle Kolkata bus last week when I spotted a rather strange advertisement outside the schlock South City mall:

"You shall be judged by the colour of your skin; your second skin."

In a sense, the product which happens to be some fashionable clothing has become irrelevant: the advertiser with the exaggerated imagination of an ant inside a Myrmecophaga tridactyla's snout is trying work directly on self-congratulatory images and dreams using coloured words. Images and dreams inspiring "colour confidence", and revealing the rest of the world in its true (bad) colours, words that remind you once more of the complex past and confused present that your country suffers inspite of all that fashion the advertisers offer you, dear Neo, this time you get to choose a skin instead of a pill!

"Woof! Colourman, colourman, which colour do you choose?"

¡Ay, Caramba! I have a suggestion, though, and I think I've mentioned it somewhere above in the oblique. But in case you're bored, let's forget that and let me sing for you a old ad jingle of times when you never thought of the big, bad world. And in case you've been wondering, Myrmecophaga tridactyla is the scientific name of a morose 6-ft long snouty creature found in Central and South America that lives on ants.

Chorus:

“Washing powder Nirma, washing powder Nirma
Dudh si safeedi, Nirma se aaye
Rangeen kapda bhi khil khil jaye
Sabki pasand Nirmaaaa. Washing powder Nirma. Nirma.
Woof. Woof.”

[Credits: See this blog by Vinayak Razdan if you're really nostalgic about the Indian advertising world of the eighties. The image of Lalitaji is borrowed from At the Edge.]

The inferno of living

2009-01-22T17:26:00.001+05:30

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

-Calvino [Invisible Cities, 1972]

Too many people have died

2009-01-17T20:47:00.018+05:30

Pete Seeger has grown old, Bobbie Dylan has changed, and what you thought were your tunes and words have died. But yes, too many people have also died in the meantime. You learn it from the sophomoric television that Israeli planes are dropping bombs at Gaza. Men, women, and children wiped into oblivion under the fire and the debris.

You've watched...

You've watched the flames rise up on the screen as the newscaster on some Indian channel switches to discuss the weather over New York sky, even when you're across the globe. Or when she invites someone who's an expert on global recession, CO2 emission, on Obama's radicalism and Chomsky's pacifism, on aardvarks, emus and intergalactic refrigerators aboard India's moon mission, someone who'll now discuss with a serious face all the implications of the UN chief Ban Ki-moon's sudden discovery: "Too many people have died." Really?

When was the first time you had watched? Oh, it had been the CNN coverage of the bombing of Baghdad in the early nineties, you and your friends played "Scud" and "Patriot" in the courtyards of crumbling colonial houses. Or simply gaped at Pranoy Roy showing his GK in World This Week as how the UN could never tolerate such an aggression on Kuwait. And now since you've grown older, you remember important events as how you watched or missed them on TV, and under what circumstances, often or not as glimpses that left without visible traces.

You had been doing a maths homework, and planning to watch Superhit Muqabila (the old crappy Channel2 TV show on Indian TV that listed the most popular movie songs), when you caught a glimpse of Russian planes bombing Chechnya. Did you, at that time, think that children of your age were getting killed in their sleep? Oh no, you had been busy playing with a toy Uzi and a model fighter plane and bombing terrorist hideouts in the backgarden.

Then time had flowed, the sun rose, moved across the sky and set, and you were reading Kundera, laughing, forgetting, and eating a crampy cheese-burger at the canteen when the twin towers crumpled. An undergrad was yelping like Tarzan as he ran across the university, spreading the news: "Hello! Everyone! Pentagon has been fucked." You returned home and watched the tragedy and all the melodrama that followed. You saw it again and again, and thought why America is hated throughout the world.

You now know the answer why.

You had heard of bombs being dropped in Afghanistan, and had rushed to the canteen where they were busy watching a cricket match. No, you couldn't switch the channel. No, not even during the advertisements when beautiful females and macho males were gulping down Pepsi, Coke, or similar toilet cleaners, and asking you to do the same. You had to wait till you could travel back to your district home, and be content with the few seconds of national television news that told you little of what happened in Afghanistan, but what every revolting politician said, shouted, screamed, winked or farted to the media during that day. (Radical flag marches, effigy-burnings of Bush followed, you melted in a universe of hot-blooded slogans, but to what effect? The killings continued, the marchers felt bored, and left)

You also know by now that 24/11 is never the direct coefficient of 9/11; just some stoopid Indian journalists pretending to be too intelligent apes after the Mumbai attacks, which some people suspect might be a covert operation of Mossad. You never know, but you know exactly why you hate these TV journalists. It's perhaps why you had stopped watching the idiot box after you had 'grown up'. Ah!

What do you feel like in 'newsless' oblivion?

The second attack on Iraq was part of shared office excitement and individual searches. Your colleagues clustered around a desktop as you together watched Saddam swinging. And you watched all the pictures of the dead Iraqi kids, shifted uncomfortably through innumerous blogs and YouTube videos posted by Iraqi bloggers who thought that they would make the world understand, and you felt like screaming. But then, time flew, and before you knew the occupation of Iraq had become so commonplace that a hundred people killed everyday ceased to be 'news'. But now, since the bombs are dropping on Gaza, what will you do? Will you sit before the TV, and switch to another comfortable channel that speaks of lifestyle? Or do another survey of blogs, videos, and podcasts, and rest content that at least you're more informed than the others?

I don't know, but gentle reader, once again, let me wish you all my scorn and hatred for all the military-industrial empires of the world. And for all who've died in Gaza, it will be very easy to say in the glib way of those like us who can lead uninterrupted placid lives far from their pain that the oblivion they suffer would be a fate worse than death. But no fate is worse than being roasted alive, believe me.

Stories, statistics, and lives

2009-01-12T11:29:00.003+05:30

"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."

- Neil Gaiman [American Gods]

"Take the slack"

2009-01-07T11:33:00.014+05:30

FROM THE ANNALS OF AN UNIDENTIFIED, BESPECTACLED, ASTHMATIC AND RHEUMATIC ROCK CLIMBER, VERGING ON EARLY MIDDLE AGE, WHO HAD HAD ENOUGH OF ROCK CLIMBING FOR A LIFETIME AND BEYOND...

DAY TWO: It's three o'clock in a jungle few kilometres close to the hills of Jharkhand, and a pack of jackals are having hysterics somewhere close, unaccustomed to humans camping in their free-trade zones at the penultimate day of the European calendar year."Ka-hua, Ka-hua," they talk amongst each other.

A devout jackal trying to sink his teeth into an Extremely Unnegotiable Roti (probably one of those I unsuccessfully tried to have at dinner with something vaguely resembling half-roasted indigestible brinjal) speaks: "Ho, ho, Ho-Ka-Hua, these humans are trying to climb those rocks even that extremely smelly black animal with hooves and a tuft of beard avoids climbing. Lord, they must be mad."

"You doubt," chips in another, "Ha, these rocks are extemely slippery and I wish someone slips and falls and breaks his neck. We'll have our party then. Damn this recession, Ka-Hua."

"Yeah, I hope it's the fat, er, healthy one with thick shiny bits of glass over his eyes," says the devout jackal persistently negotiating the Extremely Unnegotiable Roti, and probably a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. "Ha, ha, Ha-Ka-Hua. Did you see him climbing? An overaged overweight Tarzan of the Apes, swinging in space like a hopeless elephant."

"Let's hope he falls, let's hope he falls, Ka-Hua, Ka-Hua," they scream in indecent chorus, as they forage close to the tents of the Rock Climbing Trainees. But thankfully The Virus Boy With Extremely Smelly Socks had been forced to keep his shoes and socks outside the tent flap, and now they act as an active deterrent for all nocturnal creatures.

I wake up. I am almost sweating from a nightmare of what passed as the previous day, myself on all fours, clawing and scampering over a huge barren rock formation, seemingly close to the clouds, and the plains far down below, a rope with a bowline knot tied loosely to my waist faintly inspiring security, and with my bottle-glassed spectacles foggy with sweat. I think of having a drag, but the free smoking zone is a steep climb half a kilometre uphill ("Smoking is strictly prohibited in the camp areas"), and I'm cozy inside my sleeping-bag like a wizened dracula neatly folded up inside a coffin and with painful tent-pegs stuck deep in his heart, knees and toes. I resist the temptation.

But now someone imploringly tugs hard at my rented sleeping-bag, smelly from the devil-knows-how-many past expeditions, as I try to balance myself into a comfortable position from the inside. I find I'm perched atop a slippery foam mattress, and inside a knee-high tent packed tight with three occupants and all the men campers' rucksacks, reminding you of all the pungent and immoderate zoo smells you ever experienced. The tent's inside is foggy and wet, with sweaty vapours dripping down the sides.

"Dada, please, I've to go to the loo." My sleeping bag gets a simultaneous hard pull. It's The Absolute Drinker of Old Monk Rum and Persistent Loo-Goer who has been going without his essential fluid for the last two days.

"Go on, what's troubling you?" But he's persistent: "You don't understand, I have to go to the loo."

"No need to climb up high," I groan, contemplating the freezing cold outside. "The instructors are sleeping, especially Madame Chiang, and you can just get behind the tent, climb a little downhill, and find yourself a cozy place next to the weedy pond," I say weakly to the speaker. "Damn, they'll pull us up mercilessly in just an hour an a half for the horrid 3km-run and exercises. Why don't you control your emotions and get a little sleep?"

But The Absolute Drinker of Old Monk Rum and Persistent Loo-Goer is desperate, he had spent seven years at a military school where they issued single-barreled rifles and bullets to students for chasing down stray dogs. His claim to fame was an encounter he had on the roads last year with five drunken brawlers, whom he claimed to have knocked down with one-for-each Mike Tyson punches. And he's known to have carried a menacing Rambo-style knife to the Sunderbans, intent on killing any man-eating tigers on land or river, if they happened to cross his way. But now, it's a different voice speaking.

"You've to get up," The Absolute Drinker of Old Monk Rum and Persistent Loo-Goer almost shouts, and then, drops into a whisper: "There're jackals outside. You know I'm not afraid of jackals, but uuff, they are simply too many." Cold logic!

A torch flares up inside the tent, and I realise with horror that The Virus Boy With Extremely Smelly Socks is awake and thinking of getting out of the tent. But he's faster than me, and before I can throw myself out of the tent, I'm overthrown by the, the, what you call it, eek ... The Smell. By the time I'm out of the tent, both of my tent-mates have disappeared, and The Smell steps out of the tent and proceeds to devour the night sky, hung overhead like a damp smelly sock. Risking no more, I feel for the wrap of tissues in my pockets, spare a glimpse of Orion and the desolate celestial hunter high up in the sky, and limp towards the weedy pond, groping in the dark.

"Let us catch you littering close to the camp site, and I promise I'll make you use your dinner plate to clean up everything, tissues and all," Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, an overtly stern-looking camp instructor had warned the previous day. A schoolteacher by profession, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek is one of the singularly stern disciplinarians I've ever seen since my schooldays who uses words like stinging whips, even on people who thought they had conveniently left their school life nightmares some decades behind. But indigestible half-cooked brinjals and Extremely Unnegotiable Roti(s) can work wonders in your intestines, and make you brave enough to risk all possible outcomes in extreme darkness; yes, even the wrath of angry schoolteachers and Chinese gods of malice.

Edging on the weed pond, I sense The Absolute Drinker of Old Monk Rum and Persistent Loo-Goer easing himself right next to the pond, with The Virus Boy With Extremely Smelly Socks posed as a brave sentry between him and the jackals, absent-mindedly fiddling with a pen-drive, which I'm sure contains half a million lethal viruses. Without a second thought, I light up a cigarette, smile uncomfortably at The Virus Boy With Extremely Smelly Socks for I had shouted at him in the morning after my toothpaste and toothbrush mysteriously smelled of his socks, and proceed to look for a cozy spot.

True were the words of the court jester who told the king of Nabadweep after a prince was born that he felt happy as if he had just relieved himself. True werest thy words, Old Master Rabelais, who found true happiness in expunged emotions and other bodily virtues. And true werest thou, divine alchemist Paracelsus, who insisted that nothing was to be learned of life if you avoided the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation. Ah, heaven! I too shat like I had never before!

The next day, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek lines up all the trainees, and proceeds to launch another tirade: "This will be your last warning, how many times do I've to tell you, blah, blah, blah!" And her suspicion zeroes in on a defiant fidgety kid doing the final rounds of his engineering college, whom she keeps under stricter gaze for the rest of the camp. Poor kid, he's spared the cleaning-up, but his sneaking out and smoking reaches a conclusive end. I exchange a nirvana glance with The Absolute Drinker of Old Monk Rum and Persistent Loo-Goer, and we quietly proceed to climb on to our free smoking zone for a refreshing drag before our bones are bashed against the rocks...

Words, warmth, and peace

2008-12-26T13:34:00.012+05:30

You wander...
You wander through the mindlessness of ether, you wear your trousers rolled, and you see words and images combining and confusing the odd zeroes and ones that supposedly make meaning in the void, your activity limited to a vacuous stare patiently negotiating the occasional and listless flicking of a screen.

Ah, but you still got your old yellowing books, armour, and a rusty sword, dear, and your love for the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of adventures which once opened up vast horizons, the end of which now can't be foreseen, even when the sound of the motor whirring in the background no longer resembles that of a giant windmill...

Where are you?
Long, long ago, in the company of Pantagruel on a strange beach, you had once encountered words frozen in time from the last winter. The people who’d spoken might be dead, but their words and whispers remain. You used the palms of your hands, breathed some warmth, and held the words close to your ears, and listened to their tales.

Remember? Remember and breathe...
Relax now and breathe. Breathe easy and deep like the man who dreamed of making a fire in the Jack London tale. The year’s almost over, home’s someplace called nowhere, and apart from intentionality, the smiling-faced pecunious people who are usually content with lighting candles and spewing useless words on violence are planning more harm. Others, too, are playing out their confused parts of the zealous activist who is unable to act for himself but can only act for others (“oh, the proletariat”, “ah, the exploited and dispossessed”) or for ends and abstractions (“world peace” and, yes, “global revolution”).

You know nothing will come of the candles and the guns, but smoke; dense, dull, congestive smoke.

Wishes for the dead, the living, and the half-deads...
Refresh your mind, please, once again, this time of the year when there’re only smokes and mirrors. All you’ve got is your memories, and a sobriety shaped by those memories that want meaningful words, and warmth. And a sense of peace- for yourself and others, striving to overcome their isolation, and still looking for meaning.

From a strictly secular and non-religious viewpoint, here’s me wishing you for the new year:

As-Salāmu `Alaykum (“Peace be upon you”) and warmth.

[Pix Credit: The beautiful artwork above is by Anthony Russo, a freelance illustrator living in Rhode Island. I found an illustration of his while googling, and I've been a fan ever since. Here's a link to Russo's homepage.]

Speak to Me

2008-12-05T12:02:00.010+05:30

Speak to me when the stars are dead or gone
and the streets are emptied of the pained and painted faces
of reporters howling over their cameras,
when there's solitude of the kind
only you can imagine, a salty breeze playing
and there's always enough blood flowing in the sideways.
You know there're no words melancholic enough
only a strange twisting somewhere deep inside.

Speak to me when it's all over
when those moments of crises are past,
when the answers of pathogenic power are no longer
generalized narcosis or collective stupefaction,
the always delirious and disgusting manifestations
of faith in all its forms,
or when what they ask is only to be left out of it.
But us, what do we do?
Have we truly finished interpreting the world?
Or exhausted all old meanings, perhaps
to make a new point?

[Image: Death and the Mother, 1910, by Kathe Kollwitz.
From Allen Memorial Art Museum]

The best and the worst of martial arts movies

2008-11-21T19:03:00.028+05:30

This week resulted in a curious film-viewing adventure when I happened to watch a few martial arts movies, cutting across genres, and downloaded via bit torrents, while there was a state-sponsored film festival in the city. The public's memory is proverbially short, but I still happen to remember the wicked things that happened in some villages during last year's film festival, and I still retain the aversion and the reasons for not going in to the 'festival' again.

Anyway, back to the films I viewed. Here's a brief review of the best and the worst of them.

Kuro Obi (Black Belt), a 2007 Japanese Karate film starring real-life Karate black belts, is one of the relatively good ones.

Demonstrating some fluid Goju-Ryu and traditional Shotokan techniques without stunt rope tricks, the film is about two students competing to inherit their sensei's black belt. It starts off excellently with a practice session in a secluded dojo where the Jap military (this is in 1930s) comes in to take over the school. The protagonist searches for meaning in his Karate, while the other student goes on to challenge karatekas on behalf of the military, in search of a stronger opponent.The climactic fight in B&W is less of karate though, the 4th Dan hero and the 5th Dan challenger, kick, butt and grapple in the mud like we used to do in junior school.

Chocolate (2008), a Thai film by the Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew, is a story of an autistic girl picking up martial arts skills similar to Taekwondo by watching the practitioners of a Muay Thai school (?!). The plot is thin, and a pretext for displaying martial arts skills.

This film has some spectacular stunts performed by the young girl Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda, and obviously, the stuntmen acting as villians' seconds; this also marks the director's only preoccupation to outdo Hollywood special effects by using real-life dangerous stunts that can scarsely be imitated. Towards the end, you actually see a stuntman falling down from the ledge of a three-storied building, and breaking his neck. Adrenalin booster, yes. Martial arts spirit, no. For you're bound to feel sorry for the unnamed stuntman and question the mindlessness of this violence.

I also saw Red Belt (2008), one that I would rate as one of the best martial arts films I've ever seen. It has less to show of martial arts techniques, apart from some good Jiujutsu moves, but it's definitely about martial arts philosophy, a serious film concerning the role of ethics in the life of a martial arts practitioner. You get real things to learn from here, than say, from stoopid MMA films like Never Back Down.

Here in Red Belt is a Brazilian Jiujitsu instructor Mike Terry who nevers goes into tournament fighting for he thinks it weakens the spirit (rightly so). He sees himself framed by big money and comes to know of his best student committing suicide to save his instructor's honour. Then Terry gets caught in the middle of a big MMA prize fight (staged) between a Brazilian jiujitsu champion and a Japanese fighter, as his honour as a practitioner and the question of the survival of his dojo, are both at stake. But he doesn't step into the ring, as you could have expected. The story takes a new turn when he ignores the glare of the cameras and the attention of the know-it-all commentators, and proceeds rather quietly to "end this charade". Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry is simply awesome; this needs watching even if you think Krav Maga and fashionable MMA butt-grabbing is all about martial arts.

And here comes the worst. But I did laugh a lot. The funky sound track could be one of the solid reasons for you to watch this film, provided you've got the right kind of humour.

Ah, I saw Black Belt Jones (1974), a Blaxploitation action film starring Jim Kelly who's best known for his role in Enter the Dragon and it's shaped by the same director, Robert Clouse.

This movie has incredibly flat characters speaking, walking, dressing, howling, grabbing and shrieking Karate all throughout, and their acting is invariably and incredibly bad. And yes, Kelly uses Karate even while courting. You also get to see Karatekas shooting fists in a mournful way as their teacher's ( who happens to be Scatman Crothers) corpse is lowered into the grave- something so hilarious that it gives you serious stomach cramps.

"Oooooooeah!" goes the hero Jim Kelly making strange grimaces whenever anybody comes near him or when he's just watching his reflection on a polished elevator door. And sometimes he's just fascinated with his white telephone. The final scene with the carwash bubbles is a visual treat; completing the delightful mix of karate, James Bond technicolor movies, girls on trampolines, and lots and lots of butt-kicking. There happens to be a certain display of hostility on the part of 'good guys and gals' karatekas to the male genitalia; the sheer number of kicks to the bonkers and the grabs are, er, for the lack of better words, embarrassing.

Apart from the overdoses of very-badly choreographed karate, this is also one of the funniest comedies ever made. I guess, without being intentional.

Solitude, Boredom, and Awareness

2008-11-16T01:02:00.005+05:30

I'm still in a daze. Yesterday night, I finished reading Ursula K Le Guin's The Birthday of the World, and right now, just before I go off to sleep, I want to record a curious moment of recognition from this wonderful piece of work that tells strange stories about known humans in unknown worlds and times. This is from a story titled 'Solitude'.

In the fragmented highly-diffused non-society of the planet of Eleven-Soro on the fringes of the Ekumen, a girl choses to return to her solitude.

She refuses the advanced civilisational and technological knowledge of her mother's civilisation, and returns alone to the silent planet (its stolid stillness founded on the ruins of a highly urbanised technicised civilisation where there were

"(t)he greatest cities ever built on any world, covering two of the continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming; there had been 120 billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the sea and the air and the dirt died, until the people began dying too."

The girl returns to contemplate solitude in the middle of her people. She lives in a sin qua non of what she discovers as a social formation, where all the adults deliberately chose to live apart, especially the men, all avoiding and living without spoken words. And this is what she records of her own realisations:

"By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think."

Changing the Head

2008-11-15T02:41:00.003+05:30

Changed the blog header. Took three and a half hours in the night. Still very dissatisfied with the results. But let it stay. I'll not be changing this for a long time. Virtual critics will surely find this a reflection of the strange changes that have taken place on the outer side of my cranium in the last week.

The shaven-headed fish blows out a bubble. It's not attracting attention. It is asking for a change. A change in preconceptions. A change in conversation. A change to the solitude that makes up its life, a change in its movements that go in closing concentric circles. But the things inside the bubble world remain more or less the same. It's the perspective that changes. And dear fish, it's only a bubble that floats up to the surface. Did you make the bubble?

At least I will learn this melody before I die

2008-11-10T11:58:00.004+05:30

Key points from the essay 'Why Read the Classics' (1981) by Italo Calvino:

1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, "I am rereading . . . " and never "I am reading . . ."

2) We use the words "classics" for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.

3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.

4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.

5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).

8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.

9) The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.

10) We use the word "classic" of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the "total book," as Mallarmé conceived of it.

11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.

12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.

13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.

14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.

...And if anyone objects that they are not worth all that effort, I will cite Cioran... 'While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked. "At least I will learn this melody before I die." '

Dot dot dot- understood

2008-10-25T01:30:00.005+05:30

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

Suddenly the realisation sinks in. No more will I have to explain these lines to anyone. Nor will I have to look for their meaning somewhere, in someone else's 'closer' reading. I seem to have understood. Somewhat.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

Look carefully.

Measure your steps.

And start walking backwards.

And now, without turning back, walk through all the countless spaces between those gaps, and I'm sure you'll understand as well.

Don't blog

2008-10-15T19:15:00.007+05:30

If you aren't thinking of yourself and your words and expressions as ephemeral, don't blog.

Don't blog if you're seriously thinking there's someone out there who will feel and understand your thoughts as they are, and, soothe, caress, feel and understand the broken wings of your overburdened incomplete expressions, as you've yourself done countless times in your solitary wanderings.

If you aren't an advertiser for palliatives, a dragon-tooth seller, a high-flier, a lighter of a protesting candle, or a teller of lies who believes in his own conflated exploratory balloons mapping the world, don't blog.

Don't blog if you aren't a serious voyeur for soft and hard schlock images, someone who suffers from serious symptoms of security-complex, or a bibliophile who doesn't want to share what he has read of the world.

No one wants to hear of you as yourself. You cannot write of yourself. For yourself. Even against yourself.

Don't blog if you're scared, sick, angry, unhappy, radically mad, rabid, or immaturely happy about your family's vacation to the dull sea no one wants to hear about.

If you stir in sleep and think you can speak of those dreams and visions which drove Nebuchadnezzar mad, don't blog.

Don't blog if you try to run away from life and wish to start afresh from childhood.

The words will remain as they are, in suspension or in disbelief, in wonder or in imagined imaginings, and the crazy world will go whirring past as you stare at the blinking screen.

Don't blog if you can smile, weep, or scribble on a real piece of paper that no one can read but yourself.

If you think yourself staring at the void or if you don't see emptiness enveloping your memories, don't blog.

Don't blog if you have life outside this ether, these crumbling bits of real or imagined space, or if you believe that you have made peace with your mind after spewing out whatever troubles your mind right now.

Random thoughts after the 'festival'

2008-10-11T22:48:00.010+05:30

Finally, those horrid five days are over, at least for an year.
The days collectively miscalled a festival. Of crowds pushing, jostling, shoving, digging, cursing, groping, stomping throughout the night.Strutting, shrieking, belching, spitting and shitting, mobbing their ways through the city.

All to catch a glimpse of a few decorated earthen straw-filled idols of the Hindoo mother-goddess propped with bamboo. Or to gape at all that brightness surrounding the lights and stars, the 'themes', the near-empty stalls selling Marxist literature, potency-oils and perverse industrial logic. Or to look at the unknown faces of others similarly hysterical. Or more probably looking for some change in their lives drudging along the too-familiar course of work, taxes, insurances, premiums paid in one form or the other, or lives without them.

Witness mass hysteria at close-up, with loudspeakers blaring; academically-minded Marxists might find strong elements of Bakhtinian carnivalesque in the phenomenon. Look really close, and you might find people who're really lonely, trying to drown out their drudgery in the tours they make throughout the mad, sullen city.

I only wonder how many are there in this city who lock themselves up inside rooms with lots of books and trying really hard to shut off the hysteric loudspeaker sound, concentrate on imagining alternative worlds of possibility.

The stoopid smoking ban in India

2008-09-27T21:08:00.026+05:30

Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than the others. Rabid anti-smokers for instance. And here are we at it again.

The same stoopidity, the same stubbornness, the same utter unconcern for people who smoke. "Wohi zaag, wohi safedi," and increased stoopidity in the bargain as "India becomes smoke-free" from 2nd October, 2008.

Have you ever heard of big industries being heavily penalised in India for spewing up smoke and chemicals? You didn't. Though everyone knows that they account for maximum air pollution.

Have you ever heard of big automobile manufacturers being fined for creating machines that deplete the ozone layer? You didn't. Instead you watched governments, even self-proclaimed socialist ones, welcome them with red carpets. Though your lungs know how it feels, smoker or not, to breathe in the city air.

Have you ever heard of the Indian government coming out big against tuberculosis and malnutrition? You didn't, though these cause the maximum number of deaths in present-day India.

Some idiots have even started a smoke-free countdown blog. But if you thought this means no more hazardous fumes from carbon exhausts, no more toxins from the smogging cities, no spewing of industrial chemicals and smoke from automobile exhausts, you're in the wrong. For the Health Minister Mr. Ramadoss and his crowd of hysterical followers think that this (what?) has got exclusively to do with smoking, the inhalation of innocent tobacco smoke by individuals across the Indian subcontinent. If the police can't do it this time, there will be the "empowered" NGOs penalizing "smoking ban violators" in the King's Name.

And while no one thinks of smokers' rights, there's the good old Indian media highlighting people like Monica Arora (who?), convener of the Advocacy Forum for Tobacco Control, a never-heard-of-before NGO suddenly lobbying for tougher anti-tobacco laws. You learn that they've even carried out a snapshot survey of sorts and found that "Nine in 10 persons in India’s four metros support the proposed ban on smoking in public and workplaces from October 2". Aha? Even though your eyes find the contrary, and you spot nine in 10 persons smoking around in India. Mostly people who've never bothered anybody or thought that their right to smoke would be done away with sudden legislation and advocacy, and without their permission.

The ban on smoking is however part of a larger issue.

The Indian government has always been known to bypass serious problems and instead focus on certain fringe issues that would give them perfect media attention. It was during the late seventies that several thousand Indian males were forcibly castrated to fulfill the government's vision of population-control. The smoking-ban follows the same lines. Problems like perennial hunger, the large number of tuberculosis deaths, undernourishment of children, and complete absence of health infrastructure for larger sections of the population are ignored on basis of what the government decided as its priority. And now, with the ban on smoking, these problems remain intact, as smokers throughout the land will be penalised for no reasons.

I know that this legislation will turn out to be a damp squib. And cornered urban smokers will move around the corners to smoke with the policeman who will pocket the small bribe and light up on his own. (The official fine would be Rs 200 though, and the government is trying to amend the act and in future the fine may go up to Rs 1,000.)

As I write this lines, I assert my right to smoke, as long as I am not disturbing others. I cannot, however, account for the disturbance caused to the manic, the hysteric, and the rabid anti-smokers. (Other suggestions, Mr. Rajnikant?)

I know millions around will be doing the same in newly-defined 'public spaces', including private offices, hotels and universities. But for rural smokers, and those from poorer sections of the population, this legislation will provide further proof that the government doesn't really care about their real problems. Guess what, it never did...

[For those who want to know about the myths associated with smoking, here's the link to one of my last year's posts:
The Right To Smoke]

Intellectuals and propaganda

2008-09-24T19:42:00.004+05:30

"Those who are most susceptible to propaganda (and advertising) are the intellectuals...

"In fact, those who are fascinated by technique are the intellectuals, the technicians, the scientists, the upper classes, the journalists, the various shapers of public opinion, the artists, the priests and pastors (when they want the church to change and to adjust to modern tastes), the responsible economists (bankers, etc.), the professors (who have suffered enough from being told that their teaching is worthless!), and the high-level administrators. These are the ones who are fascinated and who show no critical spirit, or who, when they believe (like many artists) that they are engaging in violent criticism of our society, fail to see that they are simply reproducing in a kind of parody the technical world itself with all its perversity, thus strengthening the perverse effects and in so doing reinforcing the myth."

— Jacques Ellul ['Fascinated People,' The Technological Bluff, 1989]

Dr Binayak Sen, My Brother, Our Hero

2008-09-18T10:20:00.020+05:30

For those who've come in late, on 14 May 2007, Dr. Binayak Sen was arrested from Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh state, India.

A year and almost a half later, Dr. Sen remains in prison. After people have protested throughout India. After really-important people such as Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, Shyam Benegal and many eminent medical professors and scientists in India and abroad have protested against the illegal detention. And after twenty-two Nobel laureates had pleaded in vain for his release to the Prime Minister of India.

Dr. Sen is a paediatrician, public health specialist and national Vice-President of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), India. He is the first Indian and South-Asian recipient of the 2008 Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. Dr. Sen remains a wonderful example of a person committing his life to the health needs of the poorest people and to the defense of the human rights of tribals and other poor people considered invisible in present-day India.

The immediate crime that led to his arrest was that Dr. Sen and the PUCL had helped draw attention to the unlawful killing - on 31 March 2007 - of several adivasis (indigenous people) in Santoshpur, Chhattisgarh. Upon orders from the State Human Rights Commission, bodies of the victims were exhumed from a mass grave in the week immediately preceding Dr. Sen's arrest. And as the police investigations "continued", Dr. Sen was arrested under provisions of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2006 (CSPSA), and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967).

While the detention and subsequent torture of Dr. Sen under custody speaks volumes about the state of things we're really in here, here's a moving account from his brother Dipankar Sen, a resident of Antwerp, Belgium, whose return to India is a rediscovery of many important things and realisations...

The courtroom was hushed as the prisoner stood awaiting sentence. The judge donned his black skullcap as he deliberately passed the death sentence. That is the sweat drenched nightmare that I sometimes wake up to. The prisoner is no ordinary man: he is my brother, Dr Binayak Sen.

Recently, I went to visit him again in prison in Raipur in Chhattisgarh, just before his last court hearing. I saw him again in court. The courtroom itself was far from the courtrooms that we see in the movies. No pictures of a toothless smiling Gandhi or Subhas Chandra Bose hung from the wall behind the judge, a Sikh, Mr Balinder Singh Saluja. There were just two benches, one for the lawyers and the second for visitors. The dock, a 1.5m x 1.5m enclosure, was just enough space for the three standing prisoners while the lawyers argued their case. Binayak stood leaning against the railing of the dock.

The expression on his face and his body language did not betray any anxiety or distress of this unnecessary prison experience imposed on him through an intricate web of lies. There, standing within touching distance was my Dada, handsome, dignified, ever driven by the force of conviction, all of which showed up in the gentleness of his composure and the calmness in his eyes. I asked him how he was. "Without a purpose," was his reply. And that, I suspect, must have been one of his weaker moments, because he actually said something about himself. His reply would normally be, "I'm ok, don't worry about me. I am just fine. How is Ma? Tell her not to worry. And how are you?"

As the proceedings started, there was a witness in the dock on the other side of the room, closer to the judge. He was identifying the seizure list. The list was long, and the monotonous but hypnotic tapping sound of the typewriter caused my mind to float away. I looked at Dada and my mind drifted to the tune of "Where are the green fields," which he would whistle when we were kids in Pune in 1965. He had just passed his Senior Cambridge exams from Calcutta Boy's School with brilliant results and had every reason to be chirpy. He had a lot of friends and we would go out hiking, which meant a lot of walking through the wild grasslands then surrounding the camp area in Pune.

I was just a fat 11-year-old then and often had problems keeping up. Dada often had to carry me piggy back so that the tall grass would not cut me with the sharp blades. By the time he became a doctor, his care for the little brother had been replaced by constant concern for the health of poor Indians, the tribals, workers, the dispossessed or others that are in the process of joining their ranks.

Around May 9, 2007, I had called my mother in Kalyani, when I was told by my niece that they had learnt through journalists that their father was supposed to be arrested but was reported to be absconding. Binayak and his entire family were at Kalyani then, spending some of their holidays with my aged mother. My mind did not even register the urgency or the gravity of the situation. I just thought it was some stupid mistake that the police had made. After all, who could have anything against Dada...the poor man's doctor and helping hand? I had even nicknamed him Father Teresa, except that he liked Kingfisher beer.

I suddenly realised that I knew very little about The BINAYAK SEN. It had been a long time that we had gone our ways. But the prospect of arrest and prison for Dada were a long way off from anything that we as a family could have imagined.

The next day, and everyday after that, I called Kalyani, and realised that Dada's situation was much more serious than I had thought. That is when I started begging him to come to me, in Belgium. Run... do anything but don't go back to Chhattisgarh. He just said that he could not betray the trust of his patients, who would be waiting for him from the May 14, 2007. He insisted on leaving as scheduled, on May 13.

While sitting in an Italian restaurant in Paris on May 14, I heard of his arrest. His older daughter Pranhita first called to say that he was called to the police station in Bilaspur to give a statement, but that the police would not arrest him. About 15 minutes later she called again to say that he had indeed been arrested. It was around 12.45 in Paris that my life turned its page on political innocence. I suddenly grew up.

During the course of Dada's year in prison, I read about him in the press, both national and international. I found him on Wikipedia. I found his name on numerous internet sites. There were the admiring letters that he received in prison, and that must have helped to keep his sanity. Then came the recognition from the Indian Academy of Social Sciences, the Keithan Gold Medal, the Jonathan Mann award, the 21 Nobel Laureates writing to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the demonstrations in India and around the world.

But I began feeling guilty and embarrassed. Because of my long absence in Europe since the 1970s, I learnt about Dada's greatness, above all about his work, through the press and through the mail of his admirers from distant lands. I did not know about the hospital he helped build in Dalli Rajhara, his work in Ganyari near Bilaspur, the Mitanin project, the Right to Food campaign.

Nor had I heard of his work with the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), or of the dedicated band of people that worked with him. They included doctors, lawyers, journalists, filmmakers and the man on the street. His circle of supporters included doctors from all over the world, the most active among them being his own former teachers and class mates, as well as some who were not his contemporaries at Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, but had attended the same college. I learnt details about his career from his former teachers and colleagues at the Christian Medical College, which bestowed on him the Paul Harrison Award to recognise his work that exemplified their best ideals of a doctor.

There were two images of my brother - the more familiar one of a fun-loving man who liked good food, good music, and enjoyed horsing around with his family and his many good friends; and the other of a serious doctor with concerns - expressed even while he was a student -- about the health of poorer communities, and its roots in their social and economic deprivation. This is what his former teacher, Dr P Zachariah, wrote in a tribute to his student:

"Binayak is a very rare doctor - a man with a deep understanding of the social and political dimensions of health. The governments of the world, the World Bank and other organisations are now worrying about food security and alternative food policies; Binayak was decades ahead of them all."

None of this apparently moves the State, which refuses to budge from its position. If you ask someone in the government why Dada is in prison, the reply is standard: "He is a Maoist leader and sympathiser, and we have enough evidence against him."

So I asked the DGP of Chhattisgarh, so why is he not returning the computer seized from Dr Binayak Sen over a year ago, especially since forensic examination of the hard disc had failed to turn up any incriminating evidence. He said that the Forensic Institute in Hyderabad could not break into a code. When I reminded him that teenagers are hacking into banks and the Pentagon everyday, his reply was patently evasive.

I also reminded him that I had heard that not one of the police witnesses gave any credible witness/evidence against Binayak. He countered with the possibility of a supplementary chargesheet that was in preparation based on some 53 pages of telephone conversations with someone who is a known Maoist. Like an astrologer, he predicted that the lower court would probably convict him but the higher court would release him.

Now, how long the process would take is anybody's guess. Common sense tells me that it could be years.

Back in the courtroom, my mind suddenly woke up to the noise of some strong protests from defense lawyer Mahendra Dubey. He had just found that a letter had been planted by the police and had clearly stirred some excitement in court. The insistent tapping of the typewriter had stopped. The judge looked worried.

A letter to a senior Maoist party member which the police were claiming had been found among the documents seized from his apartment was printed on a plain sheet of computer paper, and did not even have his signature. Moreover, it did not appear in the list of seized documents that Dada and the police had co-signed at the time they were seized. It was indeed a plant. The old public prosecutor did not bother to look embarrassed, he simply denied any knowledge of it or how it got there.

I left the court dejected and heartbroken as he was driven away in the police van. An entire State was conspiring to subject upon my brother a life without a life... without a purpose, without any privacy, without any space of his own, denying him the very means of contributing to society in a way that even the State itself had acknowledged when it had implemented his ideas to start the Mitanin programme. They are imposing a punishment upon an innocent man in the full knowledge that they are doing wrong.

Now that we are convinced that his imprisonment is based on false and trumped up charges, we will want to know who would want to inflict such a fate on this man and above all why? Then we could have a possible basis and a clue to engage in a sensible dialogue with them to secure his release.

My Dada was one who, at a very early age, wondered why we could not invite the servants in our home to eat with us. At the age of five, he had the sensitivity to write:

I saw a bird in the morning sun

Flying high up in the sky,

A man shot it down with his gun

And I began to cry.

He does not deserve this fate. But for someone who has withstood more than a year-and-four months of prison, solitary confinement, harassment, humiliation but not shame, we have a simple message: Tum akele nahin ho Dada... My brother!

[Credit: Dipankar Sen's article is from a special edition of HardNews. Check http://www.binayaksen.net/ and http://www.freebinayaksen.org/ for more information and updates]

A Diachronic View

2008-09-18T10:20:00.018+05:30

"Philosophy, in its very diachrony, is the consciousness of the breakup of consciousness."

How to fly a kite and claim empires of the sky

2008-09-17T17:33:00.008+05:30

Under a gloomy sky, after a night and a day of sudden spells of rain, it's evening. From my window, I see a kid loitering around on a nearby terrace, a kite in his hand. He stands close to the edge and staring out at the huge expanse of the sky, uncertain of the rain that might arrive of the clouds and spoil his conquest of the sky. He sees birds flying out towards the west, he wonders why there are fewer birds and kites flying above the city.

He's engrossed in his thoughts, he doesn't spot the envious eyes of anyone observing him. He carefully measures out the string that will link him to the endless possibilities of the sky, the inverted blue ultra marine that flickers and changes shape; he heaves and tugs for the kite to raise its wings and soar away.

But the kite refuses to budge.

With each tug, it lifts its head, only to dive down, like the melancholy that dives deep down inside you every time you think of your childhood. The kid untangles the strings and starts afresh. Call it persistence!

I try to attract attention. I will be screaming out the directions to him, I think. "Hey, you've to feel the wind, even if it's a slight breeze. And then you've to learn how to tug, not too hard, not too soft for less than three seconds, and then you've got to lift the kite in a series of hard and quick pulls..."

But visibility is a mirage, you are visible only if the other person thinks that you exist. And you're audible only after that.

The distance separating my window and his terrace is considerable, measured not only in terms of years and realisations, but actual moments, imaginings, and a geographical distance of about 300 meters. From the terrace, even if he allows me to speak to him, he will be seeing a host of half-closed darkened windows of a dozen apartments and houses, all too self-engrossed.

The kid doesn't see me.

I keep watching him until the evening turns to dusk, and it's too dark for me to spot even his silhouette. It's a moment of pain, but it's also a moment of realisation the Marcus Aurelius way, confining yourself to the present. Every kid learns the little facts of life the hard way, experience always works in retrospect: "Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too."

Something really bad lurking in Google Chrome

2008-09-12T09:19:00.014+05:30

Gentle reader, I would like you to think about a sinister attempt of proprietary inclusion by Google who've launched their latest web-browser application called Google Chrome. There are some serious security flaws (which will be fixed, I guess) but something really bad is also lurking.

Each time you use the Gmail through Chrome, you lose all rights to your mail and all its contents under the Terms of Service (TOS) you had agreed to with Google while setting up Chrome, (we never go through any of these, do we?). And all your personal communication, images, sensitive data, etc. becomes Google property. Yes, you somewhat retain copyright, but Google can do whatever they want with your stuff. The possibilities being endless.

This is quite shocking, and enough to deter anyone from using Chrome and switch back to good old Firefox, Opera, Safari or even the extremely irritating IE. Just go through the full section of the Chrome Terms of Service listed below:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
[Reference: Read Marshall Kitpatrick's excellent write-up on ReadWriteWeb, Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome? , for more on the curious TOS set up by Google Chrome. And do go through all the comments to his article.]

On another note, I spent the whole afternoon yesterday trying really hard to read and make sense of Scott Lash's Critique of Information (2002).

I agree with his "informationcritique" to the point where he finds that present-day informational power has a "non-discursive, illegitimate, preconscious" nature, but I disagree with the conclusions reached at:

The global information order itself has... erased and swallowed up into itself all transcendentals. There is no outside space any more for such critical reflection.

If a critique is impossible because of the collapse of the seperate social and mental spaces needed for sustained reflection and critical thinking, I wonder where the externalised and extraneous ideas of the critic shape themselves, and how they find themselves inside a well-priced book, the intellectual property sense asserted with "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced..." blah blah blah.

If you find this amusing, think of the space within which your mind's operating. Is it possible for you to manouvre,browse and sort, and reach your own conclusions? Does your mind retain its independent functional capability under the information cloud?

Update:

The Google people have revised the TOS for Chrome. The EULA for Chrome now contains the following concerning Content License:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

But since the EULA is governed by what they call Universal Terms of Service (its clause Eleven in its entirety quoted earlier), the criticism stands...

What is it you can call your own?

2008-09-08T01:17:00.007+05:30

The damp spreads all around. And it feels cold at nights.

It rains intermittently, and the sky clouds suddenly and rains a few, brief showers. As you pedal down the city streets, you feel the soft heat melting down your shoulders while the logic of industrial domestication rules supreme around you, in banners, streamers, and screamers.

The sun has changed and it's now soft and warm. Summer and the rainy season's almost over, and this transitory weather, and especially this soft warmth of the sun, brings back something.

Things called memories. The comforting dreams of childhood. Your endless and futile attempts to replicate that which now seems a too-real-to-be-true dreamy life in your dreams.

And the weather works on your memories.

Memories of the days you swam in rivers, slept in the middle of green rice fields, and fished for long afternoons that never seemed to end. Memories of friends who've changed beyond recognition by now, memories of the beautiful moments you had in isolation when you were capable of playing and being content with coins, stamps, butterflies and other strange collectibles; memories of birds who used to wake you up in the middle of the night.

These days and nights keep flowing in and out till the point you realise that you hadn't been keeping track of the flow of memories. The proverbial memory of yours, dear fish— who discovers afresh the wonder of the old world after every twenty seconds— is something that you've lost forever. Don't regret. The world is still spinning around you, and you've got all your time to make sense of it.

But left without a memory, what is it you can call your own?

truths are material

2008-09-04T08:42:00.000+05:30

"Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me."

"The best broadband in town"

2008-09-02T13:00:00.022+05:30

They advertise themselves as 'a company focused and committed in offering "Total Broadband" services', the supposedly "best" broadband provider in Kolkata and India. But if you don't know what total-with-a-capital-T broadband means, you're not to blame. You'll eventually get to know if you become an unfortunate user of Alliance Broadband. And this "global bridge for all your communication needs" is one that has many surprises for you up its sleeve: it would have been OK if the bridge had creaked everytime you tried to use it, I suggest putting up a "Rotten for Use" board.

I have been subscribing for more than one year to their "Strater Pack" (Starter, I guess), which is supposed to provide you with "unlimited monthly use" at 128kbps bandwidth for 30 days.

(Bandwidth available as on 23rd August, 2008, 6.44 pm, even slower than ISDN and 53kbps dial-up. Click on the image for a better view)

My reasons for choosing Alliance Broadband were as follows:
1) I live in a rented house with the constant suspicion of the landlady's capability to serve you unexpected "Vacate Right Now" notices in the middle of the night. Going for a BSNL connectivity would add much paperwork to my already-confused desk, I had thought.
2) The "Strater Pack" is the most economical of the broadband packages in the city; it comes at Rs.392 per month, including taxes.

The guys came in with the cables, hung around the electric poles, stuck a blue-blinking LAN card up my CPU's ass, charged some money, had tea, and that was that. A year later, I regret having choosing it. The disservices have been improved on every month, the services being almost absent.

Total Broadband Experiences:
1) You learn to patiently wait for your Gmail and every consecutive page to load at an average of 5-10 minutes a time, when there's connection.
2) You learn to patiently admire your desktop background for hours, when there's connection officially, and to relearn the first experience.
3) You learn how less important your work and correspondence are, when there's no connection.
4) You learn there's a sweet female voice at the "toll-(un)free" telephone helpline at 033-3982 9615, who doesn't pick up the phone most of the time, or talks to you, if you're really lucky, after 5 minutes on hold and bolsterous music, persistently advising you to try pinging even when it doesn't work.
5) You know what a 'package' means when you get your connection cut off in the middle of the week at the beginning of each month, even when you diligently pay for your usage (and non-usage). You read the fine-print, didn't you?

And there could be a thousand other learning experiences. After having an even wonderful connectivity in July 2008, I decided to make a log of it for the next month, August 2008.
Spare a glance at the log below, if anyone's interested in knowing how rewarding broadband connectivity can be like.

Broadband connection log: August 2008

5th August 9.15pm.
Cannot sign in to the net. No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

6th August 5.45pm.
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

7th August 7.54pm.
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway not reachable
DNS Status: Host not reachable
Authentication Server: Host not reachable

9th August.
Connection problems throughout the day. Couldn’t sign in. Message says: NAS Rejected the Request. Reason- User License Exceeded. Pinging worked from late in the night.

12th August 6pm.
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway not reachable
DNS Status: Host not reachable
Authentication Server: Host not reachable

13th August 12.48pm
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host not reachable
Authentication Server: Host not reachable

18th August 4.03pm
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

19th August 10.14am
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

19th August 2.05pm
Connection unavailable from evening to night.
Says rejecting request while signing in.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

20th August 11.20am
No connection available.
Message says: NAS Rejected the Request. Reason- User License Exceeded.
No connection for the rest of the day or night.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable but DNS service is not running
Authentication Server: Host reachable & service is running

21st August 12.30pm
No connection available.
Says ‘wrong username/password’ (!) repeatedly while attempting signing in.
Sign in fails throughout the day even when the hosts are reachable and ‘service is running’. Very slow connection available after 8pm.

22nd August 12.03 am
No connection available.
Message says: NAS Rejected the Request. Reason- User License Exceeded.

22nd August 9.48pm
No connection available. Message says: Sorry could not contact server.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host reachable but service is not running

24th August 5.21pm
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable & service is running
Authentication Server: Host not reachable

25th August 10.55pm
No connection available.
Gateway Status: Gateway reachable
DNS Status: Host reachable but DNS service is not running
Authentication Server: Host reachable & service is running

29th August 1.24pm
No connection available.
Message says: “ERROR: DNS Detection failed!, Error sending datagramm to DNS server!,”
Gateway Status: Gateway not defined
DNS Status: Detection Failure
Authentication Server: Host not reachable

Longing for Home: The Edge of Heaven

2008-08-31T12:26:00.017+05:30

Obsessive dreams of love and hate. Awareness of evil, madness, uprooted memories, human frailty, pain, and the fatality of the equal exchange of coffins across international airports.

The pleasure of waiting, being part of history as radical marchers, the pleasure of being part of non-history as a teacher explaining Goethe’s aversion to the revolution, the contagious languor of pure spectatorship, and the awareness of the world as an undecipherable enigma either for the mind’s glory or for its mockery, a play-in-itself.

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007), directed by Fatih Akin, is one of the few recent films that I’ve enjoyed watching. And there’s the beautiful Nurgül Yeşilçay (sigh!), who plays the over-confident radical who learns of the terrible suspicion you have about the present— that history of the present consists of everyone being put to use by someone.

The film veers away from the perpetual scrambled of the Hollywood makes, and recognizes the variety of the will to explore two irreconcilable domains— the ‘Western’ and the ‘non-Western’— which is also the proof of the confusion. (Read a typical ‘Western’ take on the film here).

The confusion of times and places appears and reappears, dissolves into the blue...

When the story of a young Turkish musician dying of the Chernobyl radiations recurs as a motif, when a Turkish street kid becomes the indirect assassin to the dreams of a German student trying to help (read condescend) a TKP-ML militant disowned by her comrades in Germany and inside the Turkish prison.

Or when a respectable and elderly German lady (who had in her time been an hippie planning an exotic trek to India) trying to come in terms with her daughter’s mysterious death in Istanbul, and when a Turkish professor of German literature in Germany returns to Istanbul looking for the militant Turkish girl and ends up buying a book store from a German who wants to return home. All those books at the bookstore, almost none to read but the owner!

You get to see the lives of six individuals trying to balance their positions on the edge, and thinking of what it means to have somewhere to go, to lay claim to a home of some sort. After all, home is where you hang yourself, while the vagabonds die not-so-peacefully on the streets.

Small cars and all that technodiscourse

2008-08-27T00:23:00.001+05:30

"All technodiscourse either is or seeks to be discourse about humanity, about human primacy and objectives. It does not merely seek to assure us of happiness, nor does it discuss power. (There is never any question of power in this pious talk.) Its theme is true human fulfillment, which it rates very highly. Nothing is more important than the human race."

Rat kills printer

2008-08-24T23:55:00.019+05:30

Stop press: CALCUTTA. 24th August 2008.
Our Special Correspondent:
A REAL BLACK RAT had barged into the first-floor rented apartment of the old colonial city and killed an unsuspecting printer a week ago. The two-week-old "corpse" was officially "declared dead" on Sunday. The rat is still on the loose.

"This is an extremely unfortunate affair," said the visibly bereaved Mr. Buroangle, 208 year-old, the only living relation to the printer in the city.

According to Buroangel, it was a week before when the astringent rodent was spotted making serious rumpus in his room. "It was 3.30 into the night and I was staring into the blinking screen when my right eye caught the whiff of a black tail next to me," he said.

The assailant is on the run ever since. "The rat took flight as I opened the head of my printer in apprehension. There was the stingy smell of rat-piss and you could see all the bits of chewed foam and the small pellets of shit inside,"said Buroangelo. According to sources, the rat fled during the fracas generated by its presence. The printer's corpse had been lying there in the room ever since till his owner took him to the doc for repair last Saturday.

"The doc tells me that the acidic content of the rat's piss has caused a short-circuit somewhere and melted down the printer's logic card reducing it to a piece of hardware junk," said the bereaved.

The printer's other relations and parents are probably in Vietnam, and he is left without the means to contact them, said Buroangal. It's still so impossible to believe the fact, he said. "The printer's doc called me up at 10 'o'clock in the night to confirm the demise," he added.

The printer's doc was, however, unavailable for comment. Sources confirmed that the printer was a Canon PIXMA MP 160, who made strange frightening noises whenever he was made to print pages, even a single letterhead page with two words on it. "But he was a moderate printer who was serving me for more than a year, and even worked with duplicate ink," said Buroangle. "He was a laser-jet and occasionally posed as a scanner, too," he added.

With the rat on the loose, Buroangla is in constant apprehension about the condition of his books, manuscripts, photocopies, printouts, and all other domestic equipment. "Is it possible for the rat to damage my CPU and the circuits as well?" he wondered.

Memory of images

2008-08-22T01:14:00.014+05:30

Human beings can understand nothing without images, said the eccentric called Thomas Aquinas, and I guess he was right to insist at the same time that these images are mostly phantoms. So if you're working with your memory on the vacuity of substances, expressions, purity of faith, prohibition of imagination and so forth, you're probably restructuring the smoky images you have of them in your mind. And these appear, or fail to appear, at the unlikeliest of moments, severing and transforming possibilities you see of the world, and for yourself. To think outside images, is to think within them. To be outside memory, is to think within forgettable frames.

Consider, I mean what you call the 'past', in terms of these simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion. And you invariably get to think of yourself as of 'now' as obese, inactive and static, a melancholy witness to unchanging differentiation of the world around you. Call this thinking historical if you like. But you know there lies a serious flaw in those pristine pasts imagined, as they were, those mosaic of images, separated only by the reverberating smoke mists above the swamps of your mind, those that try to call themselves hoarse the perfect picture, simultaneously running along with that strange neurophysiologic logic of the thing called memory that exterminates any images and anything that cannot be easily understood.

Ah, observe how Walter Benjamin defines this position wonderfully:
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast... For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
(Benjamin, Thesis V, On the Concept of History, 1940)

Because, perhaps, and also because, you exist as a gaze that's incapable of convoking its own shades, images and shadows, the harsh voices, the wailing cries, the cults of appearances and disappearances...

Twelve rules for perfect tea-drinking

2008-08-19T10:57:00.022+05:30

What are the twelve golden rules for tea-drinkers? What makes the perfect cup of tea? Let me invite you to a problem. If you haven't noticed, there are few railway stations in Bengal which still sport the almost-century-old colonial-era advertisements promoting tea-drinking. The mystery lies there. Needless to say, these have been missed out by the Archaeological Survey of India and frantic journalists looking for bytes and column spaces for the next day. These have gone into the shaping of the Bengali tea-drinker.

And consider this, whatever be their Olympian achievements, Bengalis of India can out beat Chileans, Japanese and Russians (legendary tea-drinkers), and Britishers (the initiators of this strange habit) in at least one act—the relentless consumption of tea. Whether you are in a remote village without electricity, roads or hospitals, or inside the mad crazy urbanias (again, without access to electricity, roads and hospitals), you'll find people making, drinking and talking tea— the solvent for all troubles, the panacea for lost souls brooding over life and other complexities, the magic potion brewed from stranger leaves all claiming to be 'Darjeeling Tea' that eases out the problems of your being (without your being Subhas Ghishing).

Does that mean you've to know all these? Well, no.

Ah, but those wonderful historical signposts. Close to the subway entrance on platform no.2 of Dum Dum railway station, and at platform no. 1 of Krishnanagar railway station, they survive, in spite of scrappy paint and buckling tin, and bemuse tea-drinkers who wonder how that brown (ugggh!) liquid served to them in small plastick cups can be officiously called 'tea' . But even when you're, let's say, hypothetically drinking 'tea',— it is a forced optical illusion, my mother always insisted that the cup of Horlicks I had back in schooldays was tea— you've to believe. And these adverts tell you 'bout the benefits of tea-drinking
("চা-পানের উপকারিতা", in bold letters).
The first of these benefits is very interesting:
"There is no harm from tea-drinking"
("ইহার কোনও অপকারিতা নেই").

The other benefits are, er, less interesting: tea increases your appetite, tea affects your intelligence, tea is not an addiction... but then you're not supposed to ask questions, are you?

If you'll remember, these adverts have their bearing to a forgotten past, when in the early part of the 20th century, tea was viewed with extreme suspicion here by people who are still suspicious about anything and everything, and deeply, er, stoically, philosophical about life. It was the boom time of anti-colonial Bengali nationalism at around 1908— the package complete with bombs, Hindutva and secularism, rallies and successful protest marches after the stalling of the Partition of the Bengal Province— when there were British tea-company people out on the prowl, surreptitiously armed with cups, saucers and even money in some cases, trying to entice would-be Bengali consumers, in what could have been the best example of successful marketing of consumables against odds.

I think tea appealed to the philosophical bit of the Bengali mind— you can philosophise best when you got a purpose to your inactivity ('Hey! I'm sitting in this roadside tea-stall and this is only my seventh cup! I've got lots of work to do, you see!), and which outmaneuvers the suspicious bit ('Why is the boy sitting next to me not in school or college at this time of the day? What's cooking up between him and the girl he's talking to on the phone?'). But excessive philosophising makes you forget your tea in tasseomancy.

Enough of lengthy digressions. So you consider yourself a serious tea-drinker, and want to know. OK, try considering the twelve golden rules of tea-drinking. Eleven of them were compiled in 1946 (by a wonderful Englishman who hated calling himself an Englishman) and this still stand relevant. The twelfth is an unfortunate addition by me.

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays - it is economical, and one can drink it without milk - but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.
Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities - that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes - a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup - that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one's tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

Lastly, tea - unless one is drinking it in the Russian style - should be drunk 'without sugar'. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

(The complete article by George Orwell can be accessed here).

Stretching the eleventh point further, you reach the twelfth point (though it contradicts point no. ten in a way): Have your tea without milk, sugar or any other addendum. The best tea-leaves are not powdered, but small, delicate, and visibly green. Pure tea is organic, and without artificial flavours. Add that to boiled water (not boiling water) and leave it covered for 2-3 minutes, to make the perfect cup. The brew should be dark like mature wooded rum, but it should not be dark like the night or coal. Use the tip of your tongue to savour. You'll know heaven.

absence of speech

2008-08-17T01:05:00.007+05:30

"Language is not eternal.
It will be replaced.
We are not going to talk for ever."

Fifteen minus four

2008-08-12T16:49:00.010+05:30

Never! Never in my lifetime had I been to the first class that started at 10.20 in the morning. I simply hated it. Most of my classmates probably thought it had something to do with my complex communistic principles, a conscious act of defiance against the bourgeois university system, essentially typified in the 10.20 class, which denied students the right to sleep till noon.

But today, post 9.30, I sweated profusely and pedalled furiously as I moved in through drizzling rain and roaring city traffic to reach the university. There were kids supposedly waiting for my—whazzit called? ah, yes!— sermon. Yesterday had been my first class with a bunch of postgraduate kids, fifteen in number, and I had been assigned by R...di (the course coordinator) to take classes on Eric Arthur Blair for the rest of this week.

I reached the verandah and smoked one and a half cigarettes (I had to throw off one for ADG had stepped in from nowhere, speaking absent-mindedly on his phone). Five minutes past, I saved up the stubbed-out one in my pocket for emergency futuristic consumption, and picked up the attendance register from the HoD's office. By then only two kids had appeared and at 10.35, I was still patiently waiting. Damn, I had to explain so many things by 11.10. Another two turned up at 10.40. Two plus two made four, and I started off. It's so strange to be on the other side of the desk—this is a metaphor, for I deliberately chose a small room with a big table and lots of chairs around it— with people fidgeting and gaping at you, and you fumbling for words.

As I was, er, exploring the, er, complexities, er, of the genre formations of 'utopia' and 'dystopia', and the post-Enlightenment, er, reaction, er, to the notion, er, of technocratic, er, progress— a cellphone rang. A kid stood up with an apologetic smile and said: "Dada, please, can I attend to it?" Lost in the corridors of no-place (ui+topos, to be precise), I was blank for a moment. "Switch it off, you're crossing your limits," I said in a cold voice, well remembered from other spaces and times. Limits? Ha, ha, listen who's talking of limits. But voila, it still worked— I had perfect attention for the rest of the class which ended, let's say in considerate terms, rather miserably but slightly better than yesterday.

Kids, big brother (dada) is watching you, but believe me, his vigil is mostly symbolic. There are ghosts, shapes and mental structures that you've inherited from the past, and as long as you seriously believe in them, you cannot dream of alternate worlds, or even have serious negative visions.

In search of answers: A Visit to the Oracle

2008-08-10T03:56:00.014+05:30

Pythia, the old Oracle of Delphi is no more. But there is another oracular namesake that gives you supposedly intelligent answers. Troubled with life as it is, I went looking for enlightenment. You can go there too, if you know where to search for, and importantly, the questions to ask. I'll be providing you with the address, but if you care to, go through the questions that I asked and the Oracle's philosophical replies:

What is the meaning of life?
The Oracle replied: To live in peace with oneself.

Why does the cigarette burn?
The Oracle replied: If you want to find the root cause, look in the mirror.

Why does the sky appear blue?
The Oracle replied: The causes of this incident are rooted deep inside the human mind.

Where do I find peace?
The Oracle replied: In Afghanistan.

How to understand Derrida?
The Oracle replied: With unlimited money.

What is the most surprising thing about the universe?
The Oracle replied: Hate. This is sensitive information and you must keep it to yourself. Got it?

The most confusing question?
The Oracle replied: Hmm. You could ask me any question in the world and you come up with this?

Understanding my limits, I was rather confused. So I asked:What would you like to ask?
The Oracle replied: "Why is there no cat food which tastes like mouse?”

This answer made me angry. The next question appeared instantaneously:
Why are you so stupid?
The Oracle replied: The cause is insignificant. You must focus on the consequences.

This made me suspicious. And like all sensible people walking the streets of Kolkata, I asked the most sensible question we ask strangers when they make us angry. And it left the Oracle, I believe, in eternal confusion.

Tumi ki bangla bojho? (Do You understand Bengali?)
The Oracle replied: My Artificial Intelligence failed to parse what you said.

Ha! Guessed it at the beginning! But here's the link, if you're interested...

Liver of the Dead

2008-08-07T00:42:00.011+05:30

It's a strange tale and it goes like this:

In the village of Hammer near Czernikowo many years ago there lived a young married couple. The wife loved to eat liver and could not live if she didn't eat a liver every day. One day she sent her husband once again to town to fetch a liver. However, in Czernikowo the husband met a group of young merrymakers and went with them to a tavern, where he drank away all his money.

Sad, and without the liver, he made his way homeward. It was late. On his way he had to go through a great forest. Here he met a hunter, who asked him why he was so sad. The man told him everything, upon which the hunter said, "In the middle of the forest there is a clearing with a gallows, upon which a number of dead bodies are hanging. Take one of them down, cut out his liver, and give it to your wife. Tell her it is beef liver."

The man did just that.

When he arrived home his wife was at first angry because he had been away so long, but she calmed down as soon as she saw the liver, and began frying it. The man lay down and went to sleep.

Suddenly a white figure appeared at the window, and it cried into the room, "Everyone is asleep. The dogs are keeping watch in the yard. And you are standing there frying my liver."

The man was terrified, and in his fear he cried out to his wife that she should come to bed. But the wife wanted first to dip a little piece of bread into the gravy and taste it.

Meanwhile, the phantom, a white skeleton, had already entered the house, always calling out the same words again and again. The woman was not afraid, but asked the ghost, "Now, my little fellow, what happened to your flesh?"
The ghost replied, "The ravens ate it, and the wind blew it away."

Then the woman asked, "Now, my little fellow, what happened to your eyes and ears?"
And the ghost answered, "The ravens ate them, and the wind blew them away."

The woman asked, "Now, my little fellow, what happened to your liver?"
Then the ghost cried out, "You have it!" And with that he seized the woman and strangled her to death.

End of tale.

But why did the ghost strangle the woman? It was the man who was to blame, surely. And going by the ghost's pattern of logic, his fetish for lost body parts, a number of ravens should have also been strangled, not to mention worms, insects and bacterial life forms. I think the meaning of this runs deeper than the folk-practices that suggest not to meddle with the physical remains of the dead.

[A Polish folktale compiled by Otto Knoop in 1909, and translated by D. L. Ashliman.]

Who believes in Harvey Dent?

2008-08-05T01:58:00.019+05:30

The face of the beautiful psychopathic Joker can make you forget all. But try hard, you’ve got to remember Harvey Dent. For there's a confusing question.

In the silence of the multiplex that grew illegally atop a marsh to the south of this mad city, and in the middle of popcorn-munching SAYTMDHMs (Smart-Ass-Young-Things-Made-Dumber-by-Hollywood-Movies), your mind fidgets uncomfortably as the arch-villain to the Dark Knight whispers across space to Harvey Dent, the injured district attorney sprawling in Gotham Hospital. Your ears prickle as the Joker edges closer and says:
“Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair.”

The words sink in as Dent flips his coin, and he has begun to show two faces. I mean officially. For everyone in the movie has two faces, irreconcilable and mutually incompatible. And you’re alone in the dark with your grimace, your realization of this stereotypical double-facedness that pervades the silver-screen glare and gives you strange stomach aches. Burp! Oops, the last one was a stretched metaphor.

But consider the Joker.

On the one hand, he’s almost the stereotypical embodiment of a bomb-gun-and-scheming Guy Fawkes type anarchist social crusader (“This town deserves a better class of criminals...It's not about money,” says he as he kills a stereotypical Chechen goon of Hollywood stock and burns the heap of bank notes saying, “it's about... sending a message.” “Everything burns”, that’s his message.) On the other, he’s the stereotypical cold-blooded murderer, who plans but refuses to acknowledge his planning, displaying a spontaneous but stereotypical professionalism which masks his stereotypical smile that refuses to do anything without being paid in monetary or symbolic terms (“If you're good at something, never do it for free”).

Or Lucius Fox.
The man has no objections to his using a device to map and record everything of the private spaces of the stereotypical scheming Chinese gangster Lau (and the violation of international airspace in Hong Kong, eh?) but then offers to resign when Bruce Wayne eavesdrops on every telephonic conversation in the American city of 30 million damned souls. Ah, numerical and geographical morality once again, the same good old Patriot!

Or consider James Gordon, the Bat-friendly cop, who believes in the stereotypical principles of law while arresting Joker (he calls him “son of a bitch” though, I distinctly remember) and even consents to hound the Batman at the end (“and so we'll hunt him, because he can take it”).
But always believing in the deux ex machina extra-judicial legal apparatus consisting of a caped millionaire in a spandex costume beating cleaning up the streets with “his bare hands” (the improbability of this, even in movie-time, is testified by Lucius Fox before his junior staff), Gordon lights the lamp to his deity.

And even Bruce Wayne, with or without his spandex suit, has two stereotypical faces. As Wayne, his concern is restricted to the undefined betterment of Gotham, may the world outside Gotham and America rot and burn. Consider his conversation with Alfred Pennyworth:
Bruce: That man in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred: Oh yes.
Bruce: How?
Alfred: We burned the forest down.

Bruce nods and passes on without a comment. Follow the thread of logic here: you support the burning down of an entire forest to catch a fugitive. Now, did you ever hear of bombing down an entire country to catch a person, a tyrannical president maybe? You didn’t?

The answer comes from the man in the suit that could give you muscular cramps if you tried it for real. Much later in the movie, the Batman says: “Sometimes, truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” (Remember you had willingly bought your way into the hall, indeed, you deserve to be stereotypically rewarded, no matter what that is). It's a matter of faith, you've got to believe!

The scene where Batman beats up Joker inside the police lock-up is the best naturalised justification of extra-judicial torture witnessed in movie space in recent times. With the audience cheering, that's where the new Batman beats good old Rambo outside Guantanamo.

And after surviving all that stereotypical double-facedness, I know it will be really hard to remember what sort of values the official Two-Face Harvey Dent stood for in the movie. I am still so confused 'bout it all.

The man was sort of goody-but-stern replacement to the Dark Knight, if you go by his appearances in the movie as the district attorney to bloody Gotham, stars and stripes ablaze. In the comic books, he was twenty-six, a smart and handsome district attorney, the youngest ever to serve, and nicknamed "Apollo" for his good looks. 40-year-old Aaron Eckhart is too old for that, but never mind. Also forget the question of choice between love and commitment to Battick principles in the movie, it’s so stereotypically Hollywood. You had watched that in the Spiderman movie, you watched in The Incredibles, and even in Scooby-Doo.

Harvey Dent plays Ron Paul to Gotham (if you again excuse the confusing metaphor), and lives up to his quote as Two-Face: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” (Mind it, it’s a Dent-ed quote). But at least, he’s an admittedly confused White Knight who gets a hard push from the caped crusader and thrown off the board. And with no moralizing words of closure.

But did you ever, inside or outside the movie, believe in the values embodied in the confused attorney’s character?
(The quotes used above are from IMDB and can be found here)

dreaming of dragons

2008-08-01T12:34:00.003+05:30

In China there was once a man who liked pictures of dragons, and his clothing and furnishings were all designed accordingly.

His deep affection for dragons was brought to the attention of the dragon god, and one day a real dragon appeared before his window.

It is said that he died of fright.
(from Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo)

After a day of intense neurotic reading

2008-07-25T01:04:00.007+05:30

A sound is lost in the continuous deafening noise that they still call language, and you feel like a specialist in repetition. Repetition, as a distinct category of social existence, i.e. the separation of all the capitulative decisions that determine our lives from the execution of different arrived-at decisions. This transformative pattern of repetitiveness is simply a matter of degrees, of one’s position along an ongoing trajectory, pretending to be different, and forgetting to think of the tiresome repetitive pattern. The right amount of adjustment will get us “there” (wherever “there” is). But do I learn? Do I learn?

You realise your being, and ah, also that mutual recognition of responsibility that only happens on a plane of mutuality. Imagined, i.e. deep inside your mind, a simulacrum invented by neurons, a neurotic activity, anyway.

Creation is thought, desired, projected and organized. Your mind silently works on destruction. And destruction is a creative joy.
So sayeth the ancients.

Remembering to forget

2008-07-23T00:39:00.007+05:30

If the construction of memory is a core theoretical issue in historical and cultural analyses, understanding how personal memories give way to forgetfulness and selective attention is a damn confusing area.

"We'll remember," we swear, but we happen to forget. Why is that? Just because our brain cells get renewed after certain periods of time, and we emerge as newer forgetful humans after that? I don't think the answer is that simple. But it's the question that worries me further. What accounts for my selective remembering and unremembering?

And then, and without recourse to the Jungian collective subconscious, which is of course extremely stupid, my memory is never about the past alone and, at least in its guise as commemoration, never private and solely individualised. There are contestations, skirmishes, memorials and commemorations about the present as well as about the past, and since commemoration tends to make past and present as stiff and as a freely-flowing linear continuity, competing moral-aesthetic orders of the present make up my choices of refering back. "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future," as Orwell put it in another context. But let me reframe the question once again: Do we chose to remember? Do we chose to forget? Even when we've emphatically claimed to do otherwise?

On liquid recollections

2008-07-17T23:22:00.010+05:30

Close to the rented house a diseased old mango tree stands shivering in the midnight rain. I had never seen it before, for there used to be a house in the middle, obstructing my view for over a year. A gaping hole on the ground, and some rain-drowned debris, marks the house's absence. But the leaves of the tree tremble in the dark, the relentless rain makes a strange pattern of awareness or memory.

Black, turbid, liquid memories of the multiple pasts and presents suddenly oozes out of nowhere, and like busy and confused insects lost in the rain, agonise your minds. It is in these intense moments you get to feel that the tree's silent presence, the tranquilising nocturnal of rain falling, and your vacuous stare into a blinking screen, are the only sure proof of your existence and of the reflected reality of the world, outside this strange city cage of concrete and glass. Makes you realize that memory is forever liquid, but never lost to time, for it makes a pattern of timeless moments.

Drawing the perfect crab

2008-07-14T09:24:00.006+05:30

The king asked Chuang-tzu, an expert draftsman, to draw a crab.
Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants.

Five years later the drawing was still not begun.
"I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them.

At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

[Source: Calvino's Memos for the New Millenium; Picture by Ch'i Pai-shih (1863-1957)]

Kari and the River of Memories

2008-07-12T18:23:00.007+05:30

Though the marshes, ponds and lagoon-lakes have vanished from the urban Indian cityscape, in deep cavernous spaces within the multiple minds of the archetypal Indian city, flows a strange river. The buildings seem to rise on it. But look closer, the silent river flows underneath. This silent river, that mystic river, is not Lethe, honey; and it’s not Mnemosyne either. This river feeds on memory; it plays with forgetfulness.

And this could have been anywhere, as the story goes, but this happens to be in ‘smog city’ Mumbai.

Often neglected in printspace, animals are ritually drowned in this river by archaic local cults, offerings of bags of plastic, faeces, refuse, unidentified corpses, electronic junk, friends and incomprehensive parents are offered to it, those which clog the arterial flow of this river; there are numerous tales of a traveller lost forever to time when she discovers the river in her lonely evening walks, or is carried by river spirits fascinated by her beauty.

Of the few strange people who’ve experienced the river’s stranger shores as essential to humans for survival, decline to speak of it; only someone with the innocence of an Orpheus, and with wounds impossible to heal, can summon up the courage to speak of it. But none dare to act boatman; the waters speak of unknown depths. And no one thinks of the traveller, one or many among the crowd, for the river just keeps rolling, along, with the share of individual and collective memories, washed away.

If the above appears garbled speech to you, better not read Amruta Patil’s Kari.
Yes, the graphic novel in India has finally come of age, even though the recognition is far from proper.

I had been waiting to read it, and after going through the reading, spent a month or two, after the initial hype was over, to summon up the courage to speak on it. Meanwhile, I have skimmed through blogs and other interesting places where they make reviews— I couldn’t find a proper reference to the river itself, which connects, rather interweaves the stories of Kari, Ruth, Angel, and others, into a complex narrative beyond metaphors.

In my reading, however, the river is central to the graphic novel; it is the silent protagonist, the boatman, the city, the memories of the city and other cities, and memories of memories. The characters’ lives are situated within and set by the river's boundaries, and like true magic, these lives weave solitude and melancholy into a beautiful completion which spreads out wings, contemplating a journey, better to say a return, to an impossibility where the strange river that feeds on memories empties itself in a desperate response to its slow painful drying, until the buildings and apartments sinks in it again at the end of the book, and in the surge of memories, the boatman becomes you.

If you haven't read Kari, you've really missed something...

I got proof

2008-07-07T23:24:00.005+05:30

Finally. And it's official. The clerks at the district college kept me waiting for 3 hours, but at around two o'clock, I had it in my hand.

The certificate. The atavism of this confused pudding. The material of the muffled metaphor. I had cleared high school ten years back.

The baboo I had talked to on my earlier visit was absent, and it was strange to find, after the time spent on "requests, reminders and re-reminders" (if there is such a word), that the file containing the certificates was in a cupboard just next to his desk, fished out innocently by someone who went about pretending to be busy for the time I waited for a change in their insouciance.

I also found there're around 20 or more guys, my college-level classmates, who've not picked up their certificates. One of them, as far as I know, is in Delhi working in an advert firm, another is writing codes for a software firm of the US. Trouble lies in wait for them, in case they want to register for PhD. Hopefully, they won't.

I felt angry in a way. The absent baboo could have given me the document the earlier day itself. Or it could have been had without the unnecessary wait. It's all about attention-demanding bureaucratic self-importance on part of people toying with whatever little power they have in their hands.

But share my elation! For now I've got solid proof: I had indeed cleared high school ten years back.

Picturing Gorkhaland: Via Darjeeling and the Bengali mind

2008-07-06T00:45:00.034+05:30

(Spot the screamer: At Darjeeling taxi stand. June, 2008.
Click on the image for an enlarged view)

I had been waiting for the pictures to appear. Pictures that would prevent me from saying overtly political things in this precious little space I had saved for myself.

But my photographic senses let me down; the negatives carried only the dark shades surrounding the images I had hoped to register. And strange green spots. Only a few pictures materialized from the darkroom. Bless you.

Or else, you could be seeing pictures of the serene mountain mists sliding down windy wet terraces, once again, pictures of balaclava-clad Bengalis in dhotis enjoying a three-day spell of pleasant winter chill and attempting horse-riding while summer was blazing on the plains, Prasant Tamang singing in a cracked voice to a crowd of youngsters, and the silent blazing eyes of women marching for an autonomous Gorkhaland through the streets of Sukhia Pokhri.

For my return from the Darjeeling Hills coincided with escalating violence in the region; violence that simmers right now, but violence, like all violence, that feeds on itself and waits for an opportune moment to spring in.

The newspapers published from Kolkata that I still happen to read each morning had shamelessly fed on the violence throughout the last month. “Tourists hounded off the hills”— had been the frenetic refrain. Nothing of the sort, except a few awkward glances of people encountered, isolated acts by those idiots who always think in terms like “we” and “they” and squabble, squat, spit, bicker and bite, creating trouble for others, burning buses, deliberately hurting “them”, always believing that their political leaders will make the world a better place for "we" to live in and give "us" identities, at least recognition of some sort, and finally, the alacrity of people who always find themselves on the receiving end.

“Believe in me, I’ll give you Gorkhaland,” goes a small poster bearing the picture of Bimal Gurung, that I saw stuck on many walls in Darjeeling. I found it strange that people are believing in Gurung after they had experienced Ghising. Many hill-people I talked to during my trip, made exclamations of this sort: “We’ve little of a choice. At least we know now he’s one of us, and trying hard.”

Repetition of a horizontal level of comradeship that has been absent, but one that has always imagined in similar nationalistic imaginings of antethetical nature. Or how would you explain an eight-year-old Bengali boy working for fifteen hours at a stretch in a Mall-side Darjeeling hotel owned by a Bengali, if they share a common bonding of some sort, let's say, er, hmm, a colonial past? But you find that it’s stranger that the desperation, that drives hill-people to believe in the GJMM’s capacity for change, is often ignored.

This desperation is not fired by a political imagination, true, but is also nurtured by a series of serious iniquities. As Mahendra P. Lama, the man who prepared the first Development Plan of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in 1989, puts it in an article:

Today, the people of the Darjeeling district are demanding answers to questions such as why the entire tea and cinchona industry is in the doldrums, what happened to the rich forest resources, why are there starvation deaths in the Dooars tea gardens, why are the three hill subdivisions still crying for drinking water and basic health facilities, and why Darjeeling has only two drinking water reservoirs in Sinchal, built in 1910 and 1931 by the British administration. There are various other signs of neglect by the state government. There are no panchayats in Darjeeling and hardly any Central government schemes are implemented here. Except in the state assembly, the people of Darjeeling figure nowhere in the decision-and policy-making process of West Bengal... (Storm brewing in the Mountains)

With or without considerations of Gorkhaland autonomy, or whether the GJMM is capable of redressal, these are the questions people living in West Bengal, and those on the seats of power, should also be asking.

The problem, I think, has another important dimension. Not to be found in Anjan Dutta's movies, though, even when it got something to do with the average Bengali's mindset.

There are some deep-seated sickening notions of a racial nature that are left untouched, especially by Bengalis, who form the dominating group in the region, and are simultaneously nostalgic, romanticizing and ignorant to the region from afar. Self-critical Bengalis have no problems with hill-people as long as they are loyal domestic helps and servants, lovingly called “Kancha” or “Bahadur”, irrespective of their proper names, and relegated to work relating to broadly-defined manual labour, or infantry-level military service. And note, how the pictures of retired Gorkha soldiers peacefully marching for autonomy and beaten up mercilessly by the West Bengal police, have conveniently receded from media memory. That communal Bengali organisations like Amra Bangali have found space in and around Siliguri, and support from the ruling parties, shows that the mindset of greater Bengali “racial superiority” has not changed much in years.

As long as this stupid segregration of peoples exist in the minds of the dominant group, the birds, flowers, clouds and hill-peoples, and also all the people living in the plains, I fear, have further trouble waiting for them. I can only share an apprehension. And meanwhile, no worthwhile images to be displayed that have survived my trip.

(Birds on the wire: from the balcony of Kanchenjonga Lodge, Manebhanjang.
Click on the image to enlarge)

Find Dangerous Drugs Here: "Reiteration"

2008-07-04T15:07:00.012+05:30

India has become a dumping ground for banned medicine; also the business of producing that is booming. Apart from spurious medicine sold from registered medicine shops, there are some dangerous drugs that have been globally discarded, but are freely available in India, with or without the doctor's prescriptions.

Never did I know that Enteroquinol, the one I used to pop in from time to time, caused damage to eyesight. Or Nise, that painkiller I preferred for I didn't have to use an antacid, causes trouble for your liver. You, too, might have surprises waiting for you.

Do check the list below to see if you have been using any of these.
And spread the word.

PHENYLPROPANOLAMINE:
cold and cough. Reason for ban : stroke.
Brand name : Vicks Action-500

ANALGIN:
This is a pain-killer. Reason for ban: Bone marrow depression.
Brand name: Novalgin

CISAPRIDE:
Acidity, constipation. Reason for ban : irregular heartbeat
Brand name : Ciza, Syspride

DROPERIDOL:
Anti-depressant. Reason for ban : Irregular heartbeat.
Brand name : Droperol

FURAZOLIDONE:
Antidiarrhoeal. Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Furoxone, Lomofen

NIMESULIDE:
Painkiller, fever. Reason for ban : Liver failure.
Brand name : Nise, Nimulid

NITROFURAZONE:
Antibacterial cream. Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Furacin

PHENOLPHTHALEIN:
Laxative. Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Agarol

OXYPHENBUTAZONE:
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Reason for ban : Bone marrow depression.
Brand name : Sioril

PIPERAZINE:
Anti-worms. Reason for ban : Nerve damage.
Brand name : Piperazine

QUINIODOCHLOR:
Anti-diarrhoeal. Reason for ban : Damage to sight.
Brand name: Enteroquinol

(from an email forwarded by a friend who's a public health activist)

Carry Away Relics

2008-07-02T11:20:00.023+05:30

Which is more real?

The memories of the past or the forgetfulness of the present?
An awareness of a forgotten cultural inheritance, or the blissful fecundity of a governmental apathy? I really don't know...

Far into the rural regions of the Birbhum district, the last traces of a once-powerful Buddhist cultural community of Bengal now await their final obliteration in the hands of antiquity smugglers. And if we are talking about a criminal negligence of an archaeological kind, this is it.

The location is a cluster of villages under the Nalhati police station, about 32 kms from the Jharkhand border, and a few kilometres north of the station Lohapur, midway between the Azimganj-Nalhati routes of the Eastern Railways. Once an important centre of Vajrayana Buddhism through the 5th-12th centuries, the villages of Bara, Nagra, Baneswar, Kumarshanda and Sahakar, lie neglected and forgotten with their ruins.

The sights witnessed first hand can be quite unnerving...

A 1500 year-old decimated Buddhist pillar, with delicate carvings on it, lies face downward beside a pond in Bara village, on which the village women wash their laundry.

Horribly mutilated statues lie in the fields. Ploughshares regularly strike up statues and coins, none of which are ever reported. Fishing nets inadvertently tangle themselves in colossal stone pillars. And piled-up heaps of delicately-carved stone debris, possibly from ancient temples, vihars, or cities underneath, are carelessly strewn at crossroads to be picked up by the curious visitor or the apprentice-smuggler looking for a nice big opening in the international market.

If you aren’t plagued by conscience and need a paperweight with the face of a Yakshini which is more than a thousand years old, this is the place you go.

This cluster of villages in the northern fringe of Birbhum was an important centre for the Vajrayanis, and, if oral narratives are taken into account, once constituted the fabled city of Varanavat, which the Pandavas of the Mahabharata were said to have founded after defeating the Nishads, the ancient settlers of these lands. Gigantic prehistoric skeletons― that could have upsetted many anthropological theories― have been found and lost in the football fields three years ago, say locals.

Mounds of ancient mossy bricks and black stone structures can be seen in superabundance, in a weatherproof confidence, still resistant to the vicissitudes of unregistered and undocumented human hate.

The surprising absence of stone quarries nearby suggests that the stones, mostly basaltic rocks, were apparently sourced from the Rajmahal Trap. Imagine them being transported by the forgotten master craftsmen of the tenth century, in heavily-laden boats down the Brahmani River and the Gambhira River, which now trickles as a dried-up stream 2 kms up north, delineating the district’s present border with Murshidabad.

Of the many broken statuettes of female figures that are worshipped by villagers as Hindu household deities (or secretly stored in the attics for future sales to the cross-border buyers arriving at Rampurhat or Suri), most are characterized by what the untrained eye finds similar to the Ajanta style.

There are a few broken statues presumably made of Vindhyan sandstone here ―once sharply delineated shapes that have lost their chiaroscuro, attuned to a sense of loss deep down. Their obscure senescence can only be observed on the surface, for, till date, of stranger reasons, no archaeological excavations have taken place.

(Click on the image for a larger view)

A quick glimpse at the serried history footnotes then, all those to be mentioned in a flurry of generalities...

Under the Buddhist Pala kings of Bihar and Bengal (8th–12th century AD), Tantric Buddhism or Vajrayana had become the dominant religion here. The 7th-century travelling monk from China, Hsüan-tsang had found many Mahayana Buddhists developing a form of Tantrism, an esoteric psychic-physical system of beliefs and practices that identified nirvana with the human passions. It maintained that one could touch the deathless element with his/her body and compel the gods and goddesses to grant boons with the power of their mantras (vajra, or thunder).

An individual’s enlightenment, they believed, arose from the realization that seemingly opposite principles are in truth one. This fundamental polarity and its resolution were often expressed through symbols of sexuality. Perhaps this explains the innumerous finds of coterminous male-female figures in these Birbhum villages, along with the intricately carved iconographic remnants.

Accused of incontinence by the Brahmins, the Vajrayanis worshipped deities like Yasodhara (the Buddha’s wife), the wives of the Bodhisattvas, and the Taras, and created a galaxy of gods and goddesses, even greater in number and diversity than the Hindu pantheon.

Later, they absorbed the mystic rites of Shaivite phallicism, and venerated the forms of Shiva-Kali and Radha-Krishna. As a cult, they flourished for more than seven hundred years in the regions from Bhagalpur to Bishnupur, before they vanished from eastern India, under unexplained circumstances. The Vajrayana school, without the sexoyogic practices, survives to this day under various names in Tibet, China and Japan.

An important feature of all tantras, as of the Vajrayanis, was the use of a polarity symbolism. On the physical level, it appeared as the union of male and female. On the ethical level, it appeared as the union of beneficial activity and an appreciation of what there is as it is. And on the philosophical level it appeared as the synthesis of absolute reality and absolute compassion.

Along with the Sahajyani Buddhist cult, the Vajrayanis were the ethnological precursors of the social basis which shaped the plebeian Sahajiya cult of the Vaishnavites, and the Bauls, for whom compassion for a suffering humanity still is a way to spiritual growth.

At present, there are no Buddhists living in the district. Perceivable, for the Indian chapter had ended nine centuries back. And none of the material artefacts available today for sighting are intact― further miracles have happened, and economic ones with no attention to historical flashbacks or educational animated cartoons.

Even after the Muslim conquests of the twelfth century, material traces of this powerful Buddhist culture survived. Near to the Pir Makhdum Hussein shrine, revered irrespective of religious beliefs in the region, the sacred antimension (the cloth upon which the divine liturgy of the saint is celebrated), shrouds one of the first Arabic stone inscriptions of Bengal. One learns that this plaque, written in the Yemenic Nashq script, was set up on 18th August 1450(Hegira 854) by someone called Ahmad Khan, in the reign of Sultan Barbak Shah. This coexists with a number of large basaltic beams of Buddhist architecture, now half-submerged into the earth beside a gigantic banyan tree, conserved by the local Waqf Committee.

But a century of uninterrupted modern huckstering has taken its toll. The faces of all the larger-than-life statues found from the fields, have been mercilessly hacked away and pillaged. Only the torsos remain. Of the numerous statuettes discovered and lost, only one, of the Buddhist goddess Vajratara, has found its way to the Ashutosh museum, Kolkata. And for the 300 intact statues that were found in the course of the previous century, no records remain.

A brilliant metal statue of Marichi Devi, the Buddhist sun goddess, had been stolen a few years back. Villagers allege that the police had been in compliance. After the ensuing hullabaloo had subsided, the last of the recognized idols, of the Buddhist goddess Pragyaparamita, worshipped by the villagers as Bhuvaneswari, was stolen last year from her temple at Bazarpara.

“What can we individuals do?” said a Mr. Gorachand Dutta, who heads the village library at Bara, a lone crusader against the rampant antiquity smuggling of the region.

The library running in the village for 50 years,is in the memory of the same Gorachand!

“For three decades in vain, I had continually pleaded with the Archaeological Survey to step in," said Gorachand to the person who's posting this entry.

Each year, a number of these relics are further lost, smuggled. “Please don’t mention this in the papers,” said a villager, “You will excite further thefts.”

When asked of the district administration’s role in the preservation of these ruins, Mr. Gautam Gangopadhay, the District Information and Culture Officer, Birbhum, said with an eschatological mien, “We are yet to draw up a list of heritage sites in the district”, and added: "We could fill up the Bay of Bengal, if we had to dig around every supposed archaelogical site in this district."

Supposed? In 1916, the derelict Buddhist ruins at Bara and its adjoining villages had been specifically mentioned by the travelling Bengali scholar Harekrishna Mukhopadhay who, on personal initiative, had toured each of the district’s villages on foot. The results were the three encyclopedic volumes of Birbhum Bibarani (1916-1927) ― still regarded as the most extensive socio-archaeological study of the Birbhum district― on which many subsequent researchers have based their findings.

No traces remain of the statues that were meticulously listed by Mukhopadhay and preserved at the Hetampur Rajbari, the mansion of his funders. And sadly enough, the snapshots of the precious shapes captured in a box-camera, by Sri Bhoumick, the audibly-challenged photographer who accompanied Mukhopadhay across the district, remain the only tangible proof of their existence today.

(Draft of an article I submitted for publication to a newspaper in October 2006. After they refused publication, this went into select private circulation among friends. Two things happened in the meantime. I lost contact with a friend who had taken me there, after a 9-hour dusty journey on a motorbike without proper brakes and lights. And I failed to do a follow-up investigation. Things are, I presume, in the worse. But if someone is interested, I can provide you with a road-map. Just ask me...)

Click on each image for a larger view

Tree-faced sanity

2008-07-02T01:49:00.020+05:30

Societal culture had always created a slew of new poseurs with affectations and idiosyncrasies that sane people earlier found easy to ridicule.

True, in the crux of that ridicule lay ignorance, apathy, superstition, political blinkers or cultural incomprehensibility, and the hostility of a people who considered themselves hypothetically sane; sanity was, and is, always a confusing term. The constants that people used to assume, always melts away to incomprehension, or to newer constants.

But here, I am speaking in specific terms, like the sanity that goes into the planting of rice-buds in the rainy seasons, and not in the blight of summer, or something that teaches you to be observant, if not critical, when the world around is changing fast to far-fetidness. The sequence of the conceptions is at the same time a sequence of realisations, as the grand old man put it.

This brings us to what I would like to call tree-faced sanity. It is a category in preconception, self-relation and self-realization in a removed societal fabric, approximating as universal infinitude. It assumes a lot, and is itself subject to varicose interpretations. It's distinct from the above sane 'sanity', for it talks big structures and branches, and does precisely nothing to realize.

Does scorn and ridicule build up inside you, even when you choose to remain silent, hearing people talking tree-faced sanity? Is it discernible from your face? Careful then— the edges are showing.

But tell me: Do you consider yourself sane?

[Pix: Jurgen Habermas and a tree-face]

"The Noble Purpose", or How to Easily File a PhD Application

2008-06-28T17:09:00.016+05:30

Regret having to write this. But, better late; than never.

Every return teaches you something. But learn to be careful about filing applications.
It'll save you time if you are a last year's man, and it will also serve a "noble purpose", as I learned on Monday.

I had been to the university PhD cell, armed to the teeth with my proposal and registration form, photocopies and tattered original documents; apprehensive, for I know some masticating mammalian types at the administrative building are worse than reptilians on the hunt.

The guy sits brooding over my proposal for pukka ten minutes, and tells: "Shouldn't there be a hyphen?"
"Where?" I wonder. He points his finger to the title. "There."
A minor altercation follows.
— Naah, that's fine.
— There should be one. I know how things run at the Faculty Council, kid. I'm doing my job. Add your hyphen.
— No, it's OK. It's not needed.
— I insist, there should be one. You've come here for a noble purpose. You shouldn't be making these mishtakes."
— Yes. No. See, this is an adjective, and that is a noun. No hyphens are needed to link these two (I remember Wren and Martin. Who?)
—But there should be one.

I speak in true guilt: "Listen Mister, I have a post-graduate degree in English and have been working in English newspapers. I know..."
"Ok, ok," he relents, and picks up the next bunch. I am ready for that as well.
— "Why aren't these attested?"
I point to my signature. "There. Since these are copies of my salary sheets, and since my employers won't give me a certificate of some kind for giving them peace, tranquility and what-ye-call-it, these stand attested by me, and by me alone."

He picks up the copy of the appointment letter. "Well, what about this?"
I smile: " That's a letter from the Registrar of this university. And attested by a professor who's on the expert committee of the fellowship programme I'll be pursuing."
He nods: "I understand. Don't shout. I understand it better. Shouldn't you have a "No Objection" letter from the Reich-i-star?"
—" No Objection For WHAT?"
— "That you're getting the fellowship."

Patience, my love! It goes on like this for the next 15 minutes till I am almost convinced I deserve an icecream for seeing my application through the slot on the day itself. But at the next moment, he lands a hard upper-cut: "I see. Hmm, you've got your graduation and post-graduation certificates," he rolls his eyes over the attested sheets, and coughs: "But, ahem, we need proof that you've cleared the higher secondary exams."

Rubbing my chins, I blink: "Er, I have my HS marksh(i)t there, doesn't that suffice? Or since I've been a student here and the university has already checked my 'credentials', my BA or my MA certificates?"
"No," he crosses his hands. "I'm sorry. Next."

It's a knock-out.

As I gather up my wits and papers, I watch the next candidate frantically looking for her marriage-certificate. "This will not do," I overhear. "You have to get two 'No Objection' certificates for the change in your surname: one from the Court, and the other from your husband."

"No Objection for what?"
"For your marriage."

Poor girl, patriarchy spared me that. And in sad flourish, I made the return journey. Went back to my district college day before yesterday, after 1o long years, to fetch my higher secondary "pass (sic) certificate".

Waited for three hours for a durbar with the head clerk there. At 3.30, he yawned and granted me audience for a split second: "Come back after 5th. The admissions are on: and we've got no time."

I am patient, believe me, I'm still very patient...

House-break

2008-06-18T10:55:00.006+05:30

Houses are crumbling. Houses are crumbling all around. Right next to this first-floor rented apartment in south Kolkata, the sounds overwhelm, confuse.

You wake up hearing the dull thud of hammers falling on brick, lime, and mortar, frozen in time, outside your southern windows ; the intolerable screech of the "mosaic-machine" hits you from the east, time is wet and whirring, the morning sun has already been blotted out, months back.

You slide a glance at the debris— there still remains a wooden toy car, a crumpled calendar with a goddess's face, some unidentifiable pieces of wood and iron. There used to be giant mango, guava, jamrul, and jackfruit trees—their stumps remain; the flowers have died in their beds, of cement and dust consumption.

All in the space of an year...

First hand invigilation

2008-06-17T18:51:00.012+05:30

Your purpose is to stay awake. For you function as a verb, dating 1553. Remember kid, your etymology derives from Latin invigilatus, past participle of invigilare, to stay awake; be watchful.

You keep watching from the first-floor balcony.

“Parents and guardians are not to be allowed inside. I REPEAT, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” screams a kid, in a black departmental T-shirt, who’s on the edge of his nerves.

A motley crowd of brutish father-figures are jostling and pushing, heaving and screaming, to accompany their girls to the examination-halls. An insignificant number of student volunteers are trying to be patient; a lone fatigued university security guard, past his retirement age, is trying to be invisible; it’s 11 o’clock at Gate No.4.

This year, more than 3, 500 students are competing for entrance to the English department. Around 60 of them will make to the classes in September. “What about the rest?” I wondered aloud as I remembered the day I had been there downstairs, ten years back. Nervous, anxious, drenched by the rains, and overawed by the crowd, the faces, the city and its people. Now there were two research scholars busily arguing the pros and cons of postcolonial “Englishnesses” next to me. No one heard me sigh as I went on to collect the answerscripts, the question papers, the forms with your identities stuck, pinned and stapled on them.

The next two hours simply floated away. I had been assigned to a big hall, but there I found a wonderful senior from our department, a passout of the eighties and now a chief somewhere; one of the few I envy for real. And without realizing it, the examinations were over: perfect, except two cases of mistaken identities in our room; two pairs of candidates with the same name, identical signatures and almost identical faces; five candidates confidently in the wrong room; few additional sheets appended to the answer-scripts surprisingly, but unconsciously, finding the initials of someone on them— someone who could have still been attempting a critical appreciation of a confusing romantic poem having something to do with the caressing of an old Greek statue.

I loitered about in the corridors, I refused to go away. A teacher wearing a green T-shirt, with the words “Mad Hatter” written on them, was seen seething with soft-voiced anger. A number of the examinees’ parents had manhandled him, along with a number of students, and girls, too, as they were controlling the ‘parental crowd’ at the gates.

“Why’ve you come to study English here?” someone will be asking the kids who’ve qualified, the same inane question, this year, the next year, and the year after that.

I looked over from the balcony. Again. I still didn’t have the answer to that question. I guess I'll never have. A fine drizzle caught on, the campus wore a deserted look. I kept myself from falling over the edge; it’s so confusing to be on the inside. It brings back big bad memories...

Secret of Business Management

2008-06-14T00:14:00.013+05:30

I don't know what it is elsewhere, but here in old Kolkata, management is the new wave of hysterics, with engineering and the medical profession remaining the perennial favorites. Many kids I know, after coursing through literary studies in their postgraduation, have dug up bank loans, or personal loans from their insecure parents, in order to earn the magic wads which are said to make life happening. People of my age, sigh and heave, with contempt, or with the grief of those too old for further baptisms; but if they're working, they curse their HR personnel, who they say are always up to no good.

Without indulging in controversies, I want to share a story here.
A story about the best management training possible in India.

A story I learnt of kid Mo, swearing the other way round, for making it to a top business-management school in Kolkata, that after two years of competitive examinations, and learning that he had better been a literature teacher after his postgraduation. Here's a slice from his b-school life, and for a change, in a comics-format. No, I didn't start on my project yet....

[Click on the image for a better view]

Sleepy and Marginal

2008-06-13T04:26:00.007+05:30

It's 6.30 in the morning, and this means I haven't slept for the whole night. What was I doing? Dear, dear, I was trying to write a 300-word piece for a newsletter, after I stopped writing it at 2 o'clock. Weeding is a difficult task, believe me. Weeding words is comparatively easy, but difficult nevertheless. Then, I wandered off, reading other people's blogs.

Just when I thought I was at the end of the fatigue spectrum, I went through it without noticing. There's the power of words, demonstrated once again.

You'll find yourself galloping like a horse when you find people across the web, typing away in a flurry, across hyper-charged personal spaces and digital ether, just to make you read. Admit it, you're privileged...

Back to bicycles: melancholia, pleasures, and surprises

2008-06-09T00:32:00.012+05:30

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.
—H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance

It doesn’t need reiterating, but I got myself a new bicycle on the first of May.
More than a month has passed and the enthusiasm for biking remains, though Kolkata city is hardly the place where you can think of pleasant biking.

Around eight years back, I rode to the university on a rusty black Hercules MTB, muttering to myself about definitive todays and tomorrows as I dissected the city’s heart (dumb voice-over from JU community radio 90.6 FM: Tomorrow the bicycle races. Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle. ...)

It got stolen after a year.
Along with my definitives, all dialectical and historical todays and tomorrows, the millenarian dreams that only youth can conjure in its mind.

No regrets. Somewhere, at some new moon, someone else, of the same lost age of innocence and the defiance to unknown complicities, someone definitely younger, is pedaling fast towards those dreams, which I might now call confused, but can never disown their experiences for they taught me much. I have emerged sadder and wiser. Young mind, wherever you are, wish you my realizations without the sadness, solitude and pain it brings when you know your dreams have been played and tampered with.

But the returning to the university seems a difficult task, for the paths, too, have literally changed beyond recognition.

Biking is an attitude, I remember reading somewhere. But in Kolkata, dear, you’ve got serious attitudinal problems when you decide to cycle your way through depending on an eight year old memory.

I lost my way thrice into the mesh of lanes and bylanes that once characterized south Kolkata. Here you took a right turn, and there was a big pond to your left. There you swerved to avoid a bamboo grove, and little fenced spots of green, a garden or two where you could see and smell, at least forcibly imagine the presence of almost all the trees you thought you had lost to a distant childhood in the mofussil.

Nothing remains of them.

The concrete and brick have devoured all, given the unprecedented progress of unplanned urbanization that has swept through the city in recent years. When the heat settled in the melting asphalt and in the shadows of the endless stretch of box-like apartment houses on colony lands, I asked my way through the pointed obscenities that bristled below the late afternoon sky.

I learnt another thing. Apart from some wayward kids, it’s only the poor adult folk who use bicycles in Kolkata. The noxious fumes-spewing motorcycles, the autorickshaws and the nouveau rich red little cars, are status symbols and in an old colonial city, symbols are matters of life and death. These symbol riders take it for granted that traffic rules are to be flouted and anyone on a bicycle is to be ignored, rudely brushed aside, shouted at like a dog, or mangled like a worm. The common logic working in their minds is: “Hey, that was a sod without money or status. Or why would he be pedaling if he could have afforded petrol money?” True, sierras, I got neither money nor status. But even if I had, I would have preferred the bicycle.

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” said Christopher Morley. I am none, but I do deserve a better commendation, for I’ve survived some of their works, say Rushdie’s for instance. And no wonder Kolkata city spews a lot of rubbish in the name of literature coz majority of its pot-bellied poets and authors ride cars and autos. Taa-raa-rum-pum-pum-pum!

But inside the campus, things are different. Envious eyes caress your new black bike, friends and canteen boys share your joys, and an unknown undergrad approaches you and shyly asks for a ride. When you see him speeding away, and you happily shout at him, and pretend to give a chase, you realise that life still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of melancholia, pleasures, and surprises it offers.

Press backspace and rethink

2008-06-06T12:57:00.007+05:30

it's three thirty in the night and i had few hours of sleep yesterday... happened to read somewhere that blogging has some sort of placebo effect, it soothes your nerves every time you share your grief, solitude, melancholy, incomprehensibility, what you call it, into the vacuities behind the quivering screen...

and so here's me coming back after almost an year to an almost derelict blog that no one reads for sure...

went to the university day before yesterday... cycling like crazy, for if you didn't know, i got myself a brand new bicycle like the type i wanted to have, er, let's say 20 years ago...i felt like a bird, swerving and sweating on the roads and byelanes that have changed beyond recognition, and as i entered the campus, it was like visiting a lonesome beach where the seas and the foam have swept clear a civilisation of sand and memories... for what have we if we're left without our memories... the only faces I could recognise were those of teachers, and some kids who'd been fidgety youngsters in their undergrads, now reincarnated as poker-faced researchers, strangers all....

i adjusted my smiley mask, but felt a little unsure about myself, I always do.... here were three years ahead of me, again, since I got through the scholarship for my phd last month.... three years of absolution and privacy i wanted to have away from the big, bad world, a time to read, a time to be, a time for every purpose... and at a time when i should have 'comfortably' adjusted to being happy, bawling about bosses and tax evasions...

gentle reader, if you really want to know, outside your own shares of problems, unhappinesses and incomprehensibilities, while it rains and drizzles and muddles your thoughts, and the old colonial city tackles two bandhs pretending to protest against fuel price hikes... here's an update in short:

i quitted the 'non-profit' job i was holding to early in september last year, and that after i had parted ways with the two media jobs in close succession ...

now i'm deep-stuck in this old city, fumes, politics and depressions, doing 'nothing', well, I had planned to publish a collection of short stories in Bangla, carefully printed them out and met publishers...they didn't even bother to read... no complaints... Bengali publishing is like this... i had been blogging like crazy under another blogging platform, till i discovered the absurdity of stretching my self-deprecation in a foren language to absurd limits....

but hold on, before you complain....for two years i had also been doodling with a ball point pen on anything from the discards of my newspaper office to yellowing college notebooks of the past...

in a sudden spurt of activity, i go down to esplanade, buy myself a calligraphic pen and think of redoing my work again... as life insists on doing, 'something serious about life'... and then, i don't, for i can't tackle anything... you never step into the same river twice, Heraclitian wisdom dawns... :)

and i'm happy as long as there's the blank sheet spreading before me... a blank, white expanse of infinite moments ... i know the blankness overwhelms, but yet so pleasing... to think all, to consider all, to reconsider, till nothing remains except the expansive momentousnesses... press backspace and rethink...

Black Orpheus

2007-08-16T12:28:00.001+05:30

According to the legend, the guitar passes on to a new singer of the morning, in far-off countries, cultures and continents, and the singer calls in the sun to rise from the seas of unrecorded life.

There’s the madness and the melancholy of Rio de Janeiro, the carnival, the beginning and end of sorrow for a people who live high on the mountains but descend on carnival day, to dance away all sorrows. And here lives the smiling tram car conductor Orpheus with his guitar which makes the sun rise every day, and grief rising like vapours or sweat.

The guitar tells the story of the music, weaving the classical Greek story in the bossa nova beat and the triumphal strum, of beautiful Eurydice and unrequited love…. there in the background is the tambourine played by the magic kid of sorrow, love, death or time who observes all and teaches nothing except to celebrate particulate forms of life in the middle of the expanding darkness of drudgery.

After Eurydice is chased by a mysterious death and dies of an electrocution, Orpheus goes searching for her in the hell of the hospital and the missing person’s squad. The sweeper tells him life and people are never found in the papers and documents, and through circular staircases where people and names fall off like strewn paper, they go to a voodoo ceremony where the dead are supposed to descend.

Orpheus returns to the cliff, the slum overlooking the sea and Rio de Janeiro, and falls off the cliff after the Bacchanalian women, those who were part of the carnival, try chasing him.

Here in India, things are perhaps the same, or perhaps different, for though there are the same people, the plains here stretch away for miles, there are no mountains to call in the skies, and most artists and directors too concerned with middle or upper-class sentimentality in the heavenly supermarkets or in computer-generated violence to attempt something like Marcel Camus’s epic creation… and the music, it’s the music that touches you deep inside, the lives and songs of the unrecorded live on in children’s voices… in the dance of life of the three kids who watch the sun rising.

I feel guilty for having watched this, this late…. and i share the guilt with all who prefer to keep their eyes closed.

a sea in between

2007-08-10T11:40:00.000+05:30

This goes in after a month and there’s literally a sea in between, i have quitted the job of being a compromising journalist, called it quits and decided for once i’m not going back to that business for anything, and i enjoyed two weeks of sitting back at home and reading Les Miserables, the unabridged English translation I had dug up from my mamabari sometime in 2001, the yellowing book, bought sometime in the 1950s, its spine collapsing but its crumbling pages still carrying the marks of the binder’s fault, i am the first person to read this copy of this version and I now know what a man like Hugo has to say in spite of his didacticisms in a book that took him 17 years to write, more than Jean Valjean, I’m more impressed with the unnamed conventionist who meets M. Bienvenu before the radical revolutionary’s supreme act of defiance, and the Baron, the sergeant Pontmercy, the father of Marius, who quietly grew flowers till the end of his life, and I gobble up Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, the ending disappoints me, read Doctorow’s Loon Lake and imagine the America the was never to be, taken a trip to the sea, burnt up my skin and caught a flare in my nostrils, and read Ellie and the Shadow Man by Maurice Gee( a disappointing New Zealander whom I don’t want to read twice, watched the evening melt down into the night while the sounds of the hammers fade away from the building they are constructing right opposite to our balcony…. Here it is, I have left the city, which once used to be the capital of British India and landed in the city of the nababs… the journey begins… from here?

Go slow dear fish

2007-07-02T00:54:00.000+05:30

There's a moon fluttering somewhere behind the clouds...
There were two blue moons in June... and what are pristine fables?

The profane printed word forgets that it has a history of forgotten footnotes.
It pains you when you try to break a tiresome routine, the disciplined footfall of returning journalists descending slowly as snails, climbing a limb for a limb, down to pack themselves in the cars that lead to nowhere except tomorrow's return...

Now that i've decided it's not my world, why do i fumble?
Go slow dear fish... you're making lots of bubbles.

Chandana Hore

2007-06-29T13:09:00.000+05:30

It takes time to creep out of the shadows cast by giants... and if they happen to be your parents, it's a longer crawl... i'm talking of Chandana Hore, the daughter of Somenath Hore and Reba Hore(see, i mentioned her lineage before i started speaking of her)

Chandana is a 42-year-old artist, who holds a master's degree in Fine Arts from Visva Bharati... her solo exhibition of water colours, mixed media and the occasional oil on canvas recently left 'art critics' of Kolkata in a dizzy, because no one knew what they were writing about...

Some say to work in water colours in harder than working in oil paints, you have to know the colours really well, and then the individual drops of water you choose... thick paint, bright colours, and the magic of colour mixing with the drops...

"Then the petals open. They are the image of joy and pain. Life and death. Blue and red. Drop by drop. I loved the sea'' — goes Chandana's hand-written message in one. "Rodon bhara e basanta"(this spring deluged by tears), goes another, with no connection with the image which shows a figure, lacking not just emotions, but even the absence of silence....

Yet no one called her immature. Faces, of mostly women, drawn up without expression, yet without ambiguity or interest for the viewer. And there is not a hint of "irony" or "immeasurable sadness" her appreciators mention... i think, going by the sheer number and style of what i saw as untitled pieces, the artist is unsure of herself. She plays with paint like a kite who tangles herself in the submerged fishing nets of a pond where she dives to catch a fish.

An empty dream

2007-06-29T02:51:00.000+05:30

An empty dream is an impossibility...

If you dream it has to have some strong content.
You have to expect a reader who will flip across the pages that are filled up with empty news, or news that are so dry and false that crumple at the touch of your imagination, gaze across the moralistic sermons preached in the edit pages, the vague traces of literary reviews and art reviews no one cares to read, jump over sports news that are lifted straightaway from foreign newspapers, crumple the city supplements filled with trash about a magician's daughter procuring a strange fish, and the page3 tabloid where journalists forced to work with some chicken-brained pour out mournful sermons about these painful times, in the narrow print space allowed by bulging western actresses, who will help college students masturbate in the midnight privacy allowed by smelly common bathrooms where there are long queues in the morning...

An empty dream is at the same time, real. It's a wish where you think your reader will skip all these, and read the words, the pain and the guilt that you have to compress inside the newspaper, yet without... where you think you can have the time to speak your heart out...

am i feeling sleepy? or is it fatigue?

Assigners of recorded deaths

2007-06-15T00:46:00.000+05:30

Who records all deaths, if we care to exclude the religious allusions and mythologies?
It's the newspapers...

the words of the radio and the TV fade away, it's the printed words that remain... to be forgotten over the morning tea...

Almost every city has its newspapers, and all of these have their own pull-outs which they call city supplements... there's one compulsory space where they have to spell out little incidents, so matter-of-fact that they can't go into the pages, the editors feel, as stories...

— a five-year-old (who went to fetch his marble or ran after a kite you seldom get to watch in a concrete jungle, but this is not printed for lack of space) run over by a speeding taxi

— a ninety-year-old committing suicide by jumping into the river( she killed herself after 12 years of begging and after she remembered that she had some dignity left in her: to make the choice not to beg— this is not printed, unless the reporter is running short of cooked up ideas and advertorials and decides to do a tearjerker, a human-interest story)

—the rotting corpse of a 75-year-old man recovered from a flat( he lived alone after his wife died two years back, no one knew he had died because of his love for his wife....the neighbours got concerned only because of the smell)

—a severed decomposed leg fished out of a canal ( no one knows about the owner, who is dead as well, though his body is yet to be fished out— he was a famous football player in his village, or a musician who played on a stringed instrument yet to have a name, he was a petty criminal or the man on the street who goes to office every day, returns home contended and prays to his gods for a long life until someone decides because of no apparent reasons to hack off his limbs and dump him down the canal— no one cares if the rest of his body is still down there, feeding fishes, breeding larva, and speaking of unrequited love)

— train mows down two( farmers who had come to work as masons in the city's skyscrapping districts, and had to catch the last train back or they would have no boats to reach them to their villages )

This column is filled up late in the night, usually with inputs from the crime reporter, heavy on booze, who talks it over the telephone with police officials who have learnt it over the telephone from their colleagues and juniors who have learnt it over the telephone from petty policemen and who had learnt it over the telephone and could have or couldn't have gone to have a glimpse of the sights they mention... it's a complex process, but in effect, really simple... the person who has the assigning to do on the page, the filling of the fixed slots, solves it all... the space is short... and so is time...

the presses are waiting to devour print and advertisements...

in every city there is a person who does it in the midnight like a machine whirring in endless circles, without thought, reason or emotion... and lacking gallows humour for these people are dead and are meant to be forgotten... grammatical mistakes are avoided here, for the assigner knows no one bothers to read this, except elderly people who have a long afternoon to spend with the newspaper, and do not bother in the newspaper schema of things...

all these are recorded deaths... and there are still unrecorded ones...
who bells the cat? who sets the types? who composes? and who is doing the reading?

the boy who grows up on a cup of tea

2007-06-14T02:27:00.000+05:30

As i climb down the stairs every evening to have puffs of smoke, i wish it were the last... by now, i've almost learnt the simple law of doing nothing...

i have a glass of tea from a short cheery man with a defective leg who perches himself throughout the day above a smouldering stove, his eight-year-old son doing the rounds of shops and customers on a busy street, forwarding earthen cups and stained yellow to people calling themselves journalists...

i pass him a 2-rupee coin and forget him and the son who tries hard to learn riding a bicycle after 8 pm, when the roadside stall closes and the pressvans roll in and choke the road. His father rubs himself hard with a gamcha, perhaps to wipe off the day and its pangs, someone else uses the stove to cook food for customers...

i finish my drag... try to slow it as far as possible, for i have to climb up and stare at a blank screen and pretend being involved with work i know that is not there...

as i climb up the stairs, the lift moves, packed with journalists who never tired of climbing...

i see the boy through the tainted glass that always appears dark from outside...
visibility is a privilege... there's the boy wandering round in circles and round again his father's shop... a wonderful scene on a wet street that had soaked off huge quantities of rain...

what's his name? i've to ask one day... today it had rained and his father had a tough time attending the stove and his customers... the pre-monsoon storms that started on from yesterday evening have killed nine people in the city, some stuck by lightning, some electrocuted while wading through water, and two fell down down open manholes that couldn't be seen through knee-deep water... names that would be forgotten by tomorrow afternoon as the papers are bundled off and carelessly flung away...

the reports say the unimportant bit, how the chief minister had a tough time as his car broke down, they had to arrange benches on which he stepped to walk into his party headquarters....

but the eight-year-old had a smile on his face today... his father had handed him a cup filled with the magical brew that keeps them living, our eyes met as i saw him proudly holding the cup... it was his own, he savoured every sip... and his eyes glistened in pride....

somewhere in this wretched city, close to the gigantic presses where "news" is made and dies are re-cast each day, a child is growing up on the streets of life...

leaving for office

2007-06-04T12:49:00.000+05:30

43 minutes to go, and i will be leaving for The Office...
these are times when i want to do many things simultaneously, read the books that have been gathering dust, listen to songs that i had listened to in my childhood, watch the sky melting under the summer heat, cook the dishes i had wanted to cook for the last two weeks, scribble figures and faces and paint them in the awful colours i lost on my way to school, and finally, embark on the project that i couldn't get time to complete in two years, a graphic novel ...

time is short, and i have settled for a blog post... i know no one reads my blog, and i know i've beenfooling myself for the last few months that someone is reading...

"Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?" the poet asks...

remind me, unknown reader, to deal in detail of the people who study English literature in our sub-continent... sometimes later!

calvin and hobbes

2007-06-04T01:04:00.001+05:30

I want to.. I really want to try this out in my office!
who wants to grow up? and who can ask questions about life like Calvin?
I know there are innumerous sites and blogs hosting the Calvinic philosophy, as on Bill Watterson, but I can't help myself posting these favourites once again...
here goes the best of the creation myths...

and that's the best explanation of parental behaviour I've come across so far!

is there a better way to explain solitude?
in my imagination, Calvin is lonely...
his loneliness takes flight in imagination...
for he will look at life as we stare at a blank computer screen...

and this one's without a comment!

Sadder than a train standing in the rain

2007-05-28T12:09:00.000+05:30

Here's a poem by Nazim Hikmet, if you haven't read:

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can't get enough of the trees—
they're so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I'm at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can't smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It's this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.
(It's this Way)

"Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?" Neruda had asked...

Wallowing in a exaggerated self-dejection, I wondered whether i could think of an answer... now, i think i know...the saddest thing in the world is a poem melting away in some corner of your mind and returning like a dust-spattered happy child from play, oblivious to the world... but there are some other questions as well...

—Why do leaves commit suicide when they feel yellow?
—How many bees are there in a day?
—Is the sun the same as yesterdays or is this fire different from that fire?
—What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?
—Why does the earth grievewhen the violets appear?
—How does the abandoned bicycle win its freedom?
—How does rumour of the sky smellwhen the blue of water sings?
—Is it true that sadness is thick and melancholy thin?
—And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?

:( no one knows but the Book of Questions!

the fish in the glass bowl

2007-05-26T01:41:00.000+05:30

the fish likes the smell of the medicated water... digs at the carefully placed sand, swallows a few grains and belches them out...

on saturdays, i leave for office early, like most job-doers-who-know-that-they-have-to-attend, carefully try to participate in the work i've been assigned, and then wait for two hours doing absolutely nothing, staring intently at the computer screen that patiently blinks for me till the final nod comes from somewhere that i may leave for the day...

I hurry...stuff the book i had been trying to read in the monotonous silence inside my bag, and race down the stairs, punch my card, and leap outside on a pavement... and then i have nowhere to go!

Aw, i mustn't complain, i get a bank account at the 'tender' age of 28, and a cheque each month to fill it up and another cheque book to draw money... and it's a simple exchange, though my imagination is stifled and i feel like a sock full of spiders, i stare at a blank page and keep staring for hours until i realise that i have failed to write anything or at least a scribble and it's time for me to get some sleep so that i can make myself ready for work again.

the fish tries to peer outside, gaze at anything that will make it forget the bowl... seven colours of the rainbow pass through the water, there's the sand glittering again... and something wriggling down there...

a worm? leap fat old fish, don't swallow the bait, it's a boy who has let it down and wants you to make a bite... it's a boy who has homework to do and one hour in the evening to play until dusk of what he thinks eternity...

fish, don't eat worms for pleasure, for you might harm someone.

Ivan's childhood

2007-05-24T01:56:00.000+05:30

Narrowing down on 28 years, i get to watch Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo), a 1962 film by Andrei Tarkovksy. As the CD starts whirring, i remember seeing it long before in a darkened room smelling of straw and the smell of sweat from two dozens of viewers... i was acting as a translator of the english sub-titles for men and women who thought of fighting for a better world... what did i translate? Today, i am not that sure...

These are the times when you start hating yourself, and your unstable voice...
a voice that compartmentalises dreams, visions, feelings, emotions and arousals of a childhood and the imaginings of an adolescence in some remote corner of the mind, and seals them away with a creaking rusty lock...

And I start hating myself! I really do!

The Right to Smoke

2007-05-19T00:43:00.005+05:30

This is not a funny post. And I am serious about smoking as long I don't disturb people. And as long, people don't disturb me because i do, and will continue to exercise my right to smoke.

The office where I am presently working doesn't have NO SMOKING boards stuck up anywhere. But it is a carbonated( air-conditioned) office, with burly security guards with faces of mastiffs and rottweilers loitering on the corridors, and it is implied that you cannot smoke inside the office.

I never tried it— for I fear losing my job right now— but I hear earthquake alarms start ringing with the slightest whiff of smoke... and I wish I can have a glimpse of that, before I quit office...

What smokers usually do—and they are a considerable number— they climb down three storeys down the back staircase, punch their cards, and step out on the road to smoke...

they smoke in the rain if it rains, they smoke in the piss, if it pisses, they roast under the sun, when it blazes, but they have to stay outside the wrought-iron gates....and smoke unfazed...

Today I went down for a smoke and rabbited, er dodoed, back silently to my desk.
The gentleman sitting next to me, made a face like a blue nicotine patch and shrieked: "EEEEEEEEEE! You smell like...."
( He said that in that Benglaic English, and didn't tell me what I smelled like...something horrible, for sure, perhaps he called me a yeti who never had a bath, or something worse!)

Now smokers, and the most of them excluding the machos and the stereotypical, are by nature decent people. And I pretended to be one while I seethed in anger....

I had nothing to tell to this gentleman, and I felt a sense of guilt, I dunno where it sprang from... Smoking is harmful, everyone knows that, blah, blah, blah... But OK, this gentleman helped me learn, for I started to google and chanced on The Smoker's Club...

Here follows a wonderful dispeller of myths....

I wish I do a Martin Luther with it and put it up in large bold types on the walls of all the offices, the insides of long-distance train compartments, and everywhere where a irrational dogmatism tries to impose its codes of conducive action....

The Ten Biggest Lies about Smoke & Smoking
By Robert Hayes Halfpenny

THE LIE: Cigarette smoke and Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) or Second Hand Smoke (SHS) Causes cancer.

THE Truth: Simply stated there is no known cause for any type of cancer. With all the testing that has been done with every type of chemical, gas, inert matter, and substances that have been altered through exposure to heat or chemical reaction, nothing has been proven to cause cancer. NOTHING! In some instances specific substances, in massive quantities, have been administered to laboratory rats. In these cases many of the animals might have developed a cancer. These sorts of tests may be considered Junk Science in that they have no relationship to a real life scenario.
The World Health Organization ran one of the most exhaustive tests on SHS ever done. After years of meticulous record keeping of all the data, their ultimate findings showed no measurable relationship of SHS to any form of cancer or other illness. The only measurable fact they did discover was that of all adult children who came from homes where both parents smoked had had a 22% better chance of NOT contracting lung cancer than did adult children who came from homes where both parents did not smoke. The W.H. O attempted to hid these facts from the public until several astute reporters forced them to make their facts public.

THE LIE: The desire for smoking bans is a grass roots movement.

THE TRUTH: Smoking bans have almost exclusively been started by organizations such as The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, A.S.H., the Heart, Cancer, and Lung Organizations and major pharmaceutical corporations. Over one billion dollars, from the Master Tobacco Settlement has funded the activities of many of these organizations for the past 5 years. Promoting smoking bans is big business for these organizations, especially the drug companies who are reaping huge profits on their almost worthless smoking cessation products.
When all sources of money are added together, nearly $1,500,000,000.00 have been squandered in bring about smoking bans in about 155 municipalities across the nation. The average money spent on each of these municipalities equates to about $9,675,000.00 per location. In simpler terms it will take Jerry Lewis's Muscular Dystrophy Telethon 30 years to collect the same sum of money at the rate of $50,000,000.00 per Telethon. When a properly informed public is given the opportunity to vote on a smoking ban issue, they invariably will vote the ban down. This has already happened on numerous occasions and it is expected to occur in New York City by 2005.

THE LIE: Second Hand Smoke is a public health issue.

THE TRUTH: It is impossible for SHS to be a public health issue for the simple reason there is NO proof that SHS has hurt anyone. In fact, according the W.H.O. (see above), SHS may have some beneficial effect on children. The smoke haters like to point out that the Health Departments have a right to control smoking issues for the same reason they have the right to check on health conditions in restaurants and bars.
This is a specious argument primarily because true health issues in food service establishments relate primarily to microbes and organisms that have an absolute direct effect on heath and sanitation. It is the Health Departments' sole responsibility to see to it that health standards are maintained. If individuals are concerned about SHS a simple notice stating that smoking is allowed is all that is needed for the public to make a decision about patronizing and establishment. This concept is called, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!

THE LIE: Smoking bans are good for business.

THE TRUTH: Of all the nonsense put forth by the smoke haters this concept is nearly the most ridiculous. There was no basis in fact for this idea when originally stated. Now that the financial results of the bans are being felt in many different cities it is becoming painfully obvious that many businesses are being irreparably harmed. Many of the smoke haters who not only are experts on SHS would also have you believe they are experts in the field of accounting. They will site tax records and other data to prove the business of bars and restaurants are up since the bans were imposed. Their numbers however are egregiously manipulated and include figures from establishments that normally wouldn't be part of such a survey.
The fact of the matter is the anecdotal evidence is far more realistic. There is a hardly a restaurant or bar that hasn't been adversely affected by these bans. Business has dropped off from between 20% and 50%. Many businesses have been forced to close. Jobs have been lost, a life time of work in building a business has been lost, and city tax revenues have been adversely affected.

THE LIE: Restaurants and bars are public businesses.

THE TRUTH: All restaurants, bars, and any other businesses that have been set up by an individual or group of individuals are PRIVATE ENTERPRISES! There is no getting around this fact. It is carved in granite. Our Constitution mandates the rights of private property as one of the most important rights we have! The fact that anyone should think they have the right to abrogate the very tenets of our Constitution demonstrates a colossal arrogance that we can not afford to have in this country.
When a small group of people attempt to force their own jaundiced views on the citizenry it is called an Oligarchy. Our elected officials are our SERVANTS! They are in office for only one purpose and that is to see to the needs of all the people Henry David Thoreau said in the 19th century, "the government that governs best, governs least". He was right then---he is right today.

THE LIE: Technology does not work

THE TRUTH: Dr. James Repace, the self appointed expert on second hand smoke, once stated to the effect that a 300 mile per hour hurricane couldn't clear out the danger of SHS in an enclosed space. In Atlanta, Georgia there is an organization that deals with some of the most dangerous infectious germs and bacteria in the World. Out of very obvious necessity, the filtration system they use must be 100% effective, 100% of the time. The system they use (which does contain several built in redundancies) is not out of "Buck Rogers" but one that is very similar to the type of commercial systems most restaurants or bars use.
Several St. Louis Park food service establishments had their air tested by an independent organization. The results of these tests showed favorable results and the overall effectiveness of properly maintained filtrations systems. If Atlanta, Georgia can have an organization that deals with Anthrax, Small Pox, Bubonic Plague and other organisms that could kill people by the 100's of thousands with no fear of exposure, common sense dictates that similar filtrations systems should work on the relatively benign particulates of SHS.

THE LIE: 3000 lives a year are lost due to SHS.

THE TRUTH: Originally the number that was first generated by the E.P.A. was 53,000 deaths per year. They published this number before even running their "test". The "test" is in fact not a test, but rather what is called a META survey. This survey took 31 different reports and compiled all the data to come up with a figure of only 3,000 deaths that were attributed other undefined causes. The first number E.P.A. published was a piece of hypothetical misinformation. The second number of 3,000 they put forth was a deliberate lie. A Federal Judge by the name of Osteen ruled the 3,000 deaths attributed to SHS by the E.P.A. was a deliberate lie foisted on an unsuspecting public. Judge Osteen determined the number of 3,000 deaths was not attributable to SHS and that the E.P.A. told this lie in the expectation to harm the legitimate business pursuits of the tobacco industry. Judge Osteen completely vacated the findings of the E.P.A. So that there is no misunderstanding as to this decision, it should be noted that another court partially overturned Judge's Osteen decision for purely judicial reasons. THEY DID NOT, in any way, repudiate Judge Osteen's basic premise concerning his comments about the E.P.A. or their motives.

THE LIE: Most people approve and support smoking bans.

THE TRUTH: most people who do not smoke really don't care one way or the other about the smoking issue. It is only a very small but well funded group of smoke haters who want to see these ban invoked. When these bans are ultimately passed and the true effect of them is fully realized, then people start to speak out against them. In New York a poll was taken to see how the people felt about the ban. 86% of those polled stated the ban went way too far. At this point in time there is reason to expect the New York may be rescinded in part or in full sometime in 2005.
Canada, one of the most strident nations in attempting to enforce a smoking ban nationwide, is currently facing wide spread rebellion against their Draconian measures. The reports of businesses being financially ruined run rampant. Politicians who supported the bans are being voted out of office. Cigarettes, which are now literally worth their weight in sterling silver,
are being stolen with increasing regularity and then sold on the black market. These very same actions will and indeed are occurring in the United States as well. If the bans were truly supported would such occurrences happen?

THE LIE: Smokers and smoking impose a heavy cost on society.

THE TRUTH: Of all the lies told by the anti smoke haters this one has to be the most ludicrous. For example, if smoking kills people well before their time, the saving of Social Security and Medicare benefits would be significant. The extra medical costs to the "State" are more than exceeded by the outrageous taxes currently paid by smokers. Contrary to reports that smokers miss more work time than non-smokers is a completely unsubstantiated number. Indeed, there are so many variables as to why people miss work, it would be impossible to determine whether smoking was a significant cause or not.
Furthermore, it has been a policy of long standing that insurance companies assess smokers a higher rate for insurance premiums. This has been done in spite of a lack of any definitive proof that smokers, because of smoking, contribute to higher medical costs. It is astounding that an otherwise healthy person who watches his weight, exercises, eats a healthy diet, and drinks only in moderation if at all, has to pay a higher insurance premium than an obese person who eats and drinks to excess and doesn't know the meaning of the word exercise, but does not smoke.

THE LIE: Smoking statistics do not lie.

THE TRUTH: In this World there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Never has an argument been won based on statistic alone. They can serve only as a point of departure. In a free and open society people must be allowed to operate as free agents without the fetters of the doomsayers. Life is a risk, but it is that risk which gives it zest. When we allow ourselves to sacrifice our freedoms for the sake of safety, we deserve neither safety nor freedom. Accepting statistics at face value will lead us down that garden path. There are many statistics that can be cited that make the danger of smoking seem mild by comparison.
For example, the use of cell phones, hair dryers, and electric blankets have higher risks that SHS. About half of the smoking population has quit over the past 30 years, yet there has been no comparable increase in life expectancy. The smoke haters will quickly tell you this is because of the effects of second hand smoke. The fallacy of their argument is that if there has been smoking there has also been second hand smoke. In spite of the decline of smoking, childhood illnesses such as asthma, ear infections and A.D.D are rapidly increasing. Cigarettes and/or smoke have about 4,000 identifiable chemicals. Your daily diet has about 10,000 such chemicals. Arsenic which is considered a leading cause of lung cancer is found in significantly larger quantities in a glass of water than in a cigarette.
(i dont mind advertising for the smokers club.... )

The Plight of the Indian Graphic Novel

2007-05-14T01:05:00.006+05:30

Nothing wrong in posting a 'story' that wasn't published.
So here goes....

I always thought that it would be cool to write an Indian superhero comics about, you know, a beautiful female. Even Umberto Eco tried his hand at a graphic novel in 2004 with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. And so, after much thought (for I acutely lack semiotic knowledge), I created the concept and background with additional superpowers for this new super heroine. And I'd love to call it a “graphic novel”.

But, I guess, there’s a hitch. And it rides on twenty thousand thundering typhoons with plenty of blue blistering barnacles thrown in for pleasure.

There’s no problem with my reception of comics with McDonald munching male superheroes and their verily female Louis Lanes in Indian settings.

I like Pavitra Prabhakar(for those who have come in late― the Indian Peter Parker, courtesy Marvel Comics), for not having a proper spandex costume, but a dhoti. Though I wonder what happens when he cries and tries to wipe his tears.

OK. Let him swing from cobwebs spun on the Gateway of India and the not-so-esoteric-now Taj Mahal, and be forgotten, for we know we'll have the 'original' Spiderman 3.1, with a stupid dubbed version available in Bhojpuri. And I love the old classroom joke about the Phantom having to wash his striped diapers on Sundays. With no hitches about Diana having to mind that washing, child-caring and her United Nations job simultaneously. (Yeah, we all grew up reading the syndicated stuff ferried in from the 70s via Indrajal Comics).

And even after I have come to know what it really means to reboot in the middle of important work (Boom! Bang! Shazam!), a Chacha’s brain, that “works faster than computers”, still runs the popular show here (in those cheap ink-smudged prints of Diamond Comics). And unintelligible speech bubbles hover around the Chachi, albeit in slower DOS mode.

It’s always cool with comics. And with "Indian graphic novels". (Hold on. Huh?)

And it’s coterminous with all your college lessons in political correctness, that there should not be mustachioed Indian rajahs, flying elephants, snake charmers and evil fakirs pleasuring sharp stereotypical nails in the comics we read as adults. Oh yes, goats, bullock carts, and holy cows. Or menacing befangled statues of unknown Indian goddesses with Cambodian faces lurking in the oriental dark while Batman battles a skimpily-clad Sandra Wu-San, also called Lady Shiva (!!!)...

Unknowingly, I have come to terms with superheroes with muscles bulging with overdoses of testosterone, women who as a rule are pigeon-brained like Bollywood lolls and with explosions and splashes of colour erupting from the material of the background that make Dali's dreamscapes a child’s scribble.

But how does one come to term with new age comics coming from India?

Just forget if you had a dislike for Betty, Veronica or Bela (Bahadur’s girlfriend). I was browsing through the images of The Snake Woman series, introduced by Virgin Comics India recently, when I noticed this strange process of reverse outsourcing― the oddities of anatomical exaggeration have been well learnt. Compare our Snake Woman (Jessica Peterson) with the Wonder Woman of DC Comics, and you’ll find both are excellent in exposing their skin, in costumes conveniently ripped open to show cleavage and time-tested lines and alchemy of 'artistic' finesse that people who think and imagine primarily with their dicks find excellent...

“Snake Woman is the re-invention of India's ancient Snake (Naga) legends,” says the Virgin comics web post, “in which the soul of the serpent reptile is reborn in the form of a sexy and unsuspecting heroine.” Let’s not discuss other Virgin titles as Devi or the Sadhu, for horrible is the word. The reincarnated memories of all Nagaraj comics and those horrid Sridevi films and their cute innocent wet sari slithering sequels curl back, in spite of the tremendous pain the pencillers and inkers incurred in their monitors and drawing boards(if any!)...

Are the Indian graphic novels, a symbol of something we are just on the verge of understanding, getting filtered through the same sensibilities?

An adolescent’s first encounter with sex, perhaps?

The best response to Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridors, what is passed off as the first Indian graphic novel, has only been my furtive recognition of “Hakim Tartoosi’s potency oil”. Milo Manara draws better than Sarnath, and doesn't have his pretensions..but no, no comparisons...

We are talking about the Baboo Bankim Chandra of the Indian graphic novel....

His second work, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, published recently by Penguin Books as “an irreverent tale of illicit sex and drunken religio- sity,” claims to go back to "explore eighteenth-century Calcutta, in scandals and vicious rumours"...And this is done with gross historical inaccuracies... where pictures lifted from advertisements published in late 19th century in The Friends of India, are passed off as Company-era stuff (it was in 1858, remember, when India passed under the Crown)...

The Indian press is all praise (they are for Shilpa Shetty and Rakhi Sawant as well!) for Sarnath, whose illustrations, simply put, are horrible! In some frames, you'll see that the artist in his hurry to fame has simply forgotten to erase his pencil-marks from paper... something I never found repeated in the comics and graphic novels he tries to emulate...

And even when you have plentiful instances of intellectual foppery and postcolonial spin offs, our graphic novelist writes 'Nuncoomar' like a pucca Company-era sahib (not for the flavour, mind it)—the anglicised name for 'Nandakumar', the capitulating Bengali brahmin framed and hung by Hastings in 1785...

In short, Sarnath preserves the currently fashionable tendency of preserving "angst-laden indianness'' for his urbane Western consumer.... He says local trains, tries drawing them, but ends up drawing the inside of a long-distance passenger train! The most repulsive part is when he reaches the burning ghats...if our artist had cared to check the actual ones, he would have found electric furnaces in Kolkata,those run even worse than pyres and with a squalor that overwhelms...

OK! Enough of that! Here’s the hitch I mentioned at the beginning...

I always thought “graphic novels” were all serious literature. But in India, you could be well bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space.

P.S. That's where lessons come handy!

Stories of the Street

2007-05-09T22:16:00.000+05:30

This is a post I would want to make all over again, again all over....
I got a disc this evening from T which contains all the albums of Leonard Cohen...
So, readers beware of getting overdoses (if you think like that, don't come here to read!) of Cohen and Cohen... In December 1967, Cohen's album carried 'Stories of the Street'... what did he think when he wrote these lines?!

The stories of the street are mine, the Spanish voices laugh.
The Cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas,
and I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose,
yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose.

I know you've heard it's over now and war must surely come,
the cities they are broke in half and the middle men are gone.
But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk,
All these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?

And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still that were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine O stranger at your wheel,
You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.

The age of lust is giving birth, and both the parents ask
the nurse to tell them fairy tales on both sides of the glass.
And now the infant with his cord is hauled in like a kite,
and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night.

O come with me my little one, we will find that farm
and grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm.
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am,
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb.

With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl
I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world.
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky,
and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye...

Eight years and seven lives for a plank and the May Day story

2007-05-02T00:54:00.000+05:30

One afternoon in 1945, says Pablo Neruda in his autobiography, he spoke to the laborers in a machine shop in the offices of the María Elena potassium-nitrate mine. The floor of the huge workshop was, as always slushy with water, oil, and acids. The union leaders and Neruda walked on a plank that kept them off the mire.

“These planks,” Neruda was told, “cost us fifteen strikes in a row, eight years of petitioning, and seven dead.”

The deaths occurred when the company’s private police carried off seven leaders during a strike. The guards rode horses, while the workers, bound with ropes, followed on foot over the lonely stretches of sand. It took only a few shots to murder them. Their bodies, learnt Neruda, were left lying in the desert sun and cold, until they were picked up and buried by their fellow workers....

It's a day past May Day and this is one of the times when you have to look back, wipe off the dust that settles on your spectacles, and the grime that sticks to it and makes the world around look like a shadow pantomime... it’s May Day once again, come and gone, and I get a day off from work, like countless others, throughout the globe...

A commonality, a solidarity? Nah, things and people are forgotten fast.

But sometimes their stories and their dreams do survive...

And some words float in from the past, if you haven't forgotten all about it already, or in case you never heard the words shouted by August Spies on November 11, 1887, as the gallows floor dropped:

"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

Dreams of a far-off country, from another century, seems to fill the silence of the present...and I wish it fills this this blue-green inverted void compounded of many simples and complexes...

Our silences?

the labyrinth of Lucknow

2007-04-03T15:43:00.002+05:30

It has been three weeks and like a whirlwind tour....

fatigue takes the better of me now, it's more of the mind, and the body obliging the blunted neurons.....

many lessons learnt and unlearnt as well.....

And i don't know how my sense have jarred, but they have...

the inside of my mouth pains with excess of nicotine and grief, the inability to open my mouth and do something, anything for the people who recounted their stories to me, lives of people opened up like never before, and never encountered in history books, sometimes making one-liners in newspaper references after they have died a painful death...

people who were men and women, now chased like dogs, hounded like witches, bodies deposed in pits where the souls lose their way....

is this 'incredible India?'

Callouses form hard, and I am insensitive to pain, acting as a foreigner who shrieks at unimaginable sights with glee, and readies the camera out of her bag....

Grief?! for what?

In the course of learning about HIV/AIDS, people who die like flies in the UP countryside, and gargantuan words sp-oken with little effects and apathy by government functionaries and NGOS alike, i dreamt, slept and dreamt again of the lucknow labyrinths....

the shoes of the Nabab are still there.
Am i hallucinating?!

And fluttering doves, collapsing columns, melting heat....
wafting smells from the medical college morgue....

there is a man moving in the heat, painted green and red- a living hoarding for the samajvadi party, for there are to be elections in Uttar Pradesh

But there is warmth inside the labyrinths, and it costs only twenty rupees if you don't take a guide....who needs a guide anyway?

There's warmth inside the labyrinths, and darkness, for the passages to the underground have been sealed off after 1857.

Must Read Books, in case you die...

2007-02-17T11:12:00.002+05:30

Here's an interesting blog I've run into....

it tells you the most important thing about life and allows a comprehensive list of books to read, before you, or in this case I, die....

The list is spread out in time century-wise, and you can argue it's a bit euro-centric.... and i wish it also told you where to get the books, in case you were living in a remote corner of the world, without access to the Libraries of Tlon and Ukbar...

But check this out if you're interested.

The True Story of Job Search Engines

2007-02-16T05:19:00.000+05:30

Aren't they wonderful?

You think of landing yourself in the best place you can sell yourself, and they advertise for you in the way anglers advertise live worms under water. We like to be worms.... that's the primordial genetic buzz recurring from time to time, and there is no denying that. So there are elaborate procedures, forms to fill out, newsletters that don't mean anything, and search engines which always make you think that you are a dreaming loser....for you never find the 'dream job' (as if a job can be anything other than a nightmare)....

Ever thought why these job search engines exist?

Here's the secret. I have mostly kept it to myself since few people would believe me, and it's hard to believe all the same. Leave that to you.... here's how I learnt.

I learnt it that day I climbed on my lame duck and planned for a long Himalayan tour.

Me and my duck, soared up high into the clouds one day and without deviating from the original version of Buro Angla's story, did a sightseeing that could have spoiled all the fun out of your goggle earth... we even planted pins and re-wrote locations in the clouds when some wikid kites mapping the sky in rectangles chased us off the clouds.

So, we kept to well-trodden routes and limped....across the sky.

Houses, villages, deserted playgrounds, for the children were back from schools and off to their coaching classes, bushes, with lots of moonstruck couples reclining in the under shrubs to escape the glare of the sun, cell phone towers that looked like obscene pins stuck on residential butts, and rice fields that looked like motorcycles and small cars, for we are having serious industries now in West Bengal and we are damn serious about 'unnoyon',i.e. develop, developer, developing, and always developing... whether you like it or not.

Soon enough, we found a pack of wild ducks heading for the abode of the gods.

"Did you register?", their pack leader cried out hoarse.

"Where?", my duck asked.

I took the pleasure of explaining passports and visas and long drawn-out forms that have no meaning for a bird. Even when he's a lame duck. But the wild duck waved me off. You see, she was waving her wings, rather flapping, but you can easily make out a gesture of dismissal.

"Did you register yourself with the Engines?", she asked with a proud flap.

We were ashamed and knew not what to answer. My duck did a silent negative flap-flap.

Flap-flap! Flap-flap!
Flap-flap! Flap-flap!

"Why don't you say something?" I shouted.

Flap-flap! Flap-flap!
Flap-flap! Flap-flap!

And she smiled like a fresh frank and finned air hostess in black n white and told us the way to a forest where we would find an answer. The sky whizzed past, and my lame duck kept complaining about hunger and I wished I had a roast duck.

Soon, after three hours of flap-flap, we reached a dense forest with birds hovering around and cursing. The pack leader of the wild ducks had mentioned a tree where they did the regis... er, you know, the important things... and we moved in towards that.

There was a long queue( not the bevy sort) of birds, fluttering and cursing, with feathers descending all over like when you see many pillows bursting in serious fights over biscuits, but a solemn line that looked like a pack of winged superherons(that's the neuter), bound by duty to explore the world's collective ass than save it... There was also a heron selling packed biscuits and tea. But who was there at the end of the line?

Why, there was the raven I had chased in the morning with a sling and both of us had missed each other's eyes and then decided on an honourable retreat. Now, he was sitting on the highest branch of the tree that looked like a terrible yawn and he was handing over forms to fill up. And there was a weasel who looked like an obscene overgrown cat, scribbling something on a nut that looked like a nut-top. He was purring over his cell phone from time to time. I heard he was with the avian resource department and if you stepped in close, you could spot the features of a small sparrow bristling from a corner of his mouth. She had tried to reason with him.

"How many?" the raven asked a dove who looked like she would cry.

"Zero hits," the weasel whispered to his ears. "And the employers are very angry".
The raven handed her another form.

The dove spoke imploringly," Please sir, this is the unghthjufhfyhfth time I have tried... Tell me, is there no way out?"

"None!" cried the raven.
"None!" cried the weasel who looked like an obscene overgrown cat.
"None!" cried the queue that looked like a pack of winged superherons, bound by duty to explore the world's collective ass than save it...

"What's that for?", asked my lame duck.
"None!" I said and gave him a good kick. And he kicked me back with his lame foot.

unght!! flap! flap! you got it!

dISCLAIMER: tHIS pOST iS fOR tHE gENERAL aWARENESS oF pEOPLE wHO nEVER lEARN aNYTHING fROM aNYTHING, eVEN fROM hEGEL'S tHEORY oF hISTORY tHAT pEOPLE dON'T lEARN aNYTHING fROM aNYTHING iN hISTORY, eSPECIALLY fROM sTUPID pOSTS lIKE tHESE...

the sound of rain falling on rain

2007-02-08T02:12:00.000+05:30

There's the sound coming.
It is raining outside.
And it's two thirty into the night.

The streets have fallen asleep and there's no one outside except....
There, can you hear that?
There goes a rumble, and another, and there comes another one... the thunder gods are out to chase out words. I wish I could go outside, drench myself, and carry into my room all the orphaned words who are yelping outside.... forge them anew into letters and paint powerful shapes that would tempt and tease...

where does one write?

2007-02-05T00:51:00.000+05:30

Well, here i've started my blog, and i don't know what to do with it...
there are some inane words, which were wanting to reach out ....

but where does one place them? Do they stay put? What happens when one is not sure whether there is any space left for communication.... is there?

A ceaseless sound that is new to the ear, a name that is free from memory, all melting lies, parched tales of disturbed sleep, honeyed oblivion.... and a name that is free from memory...

AND IT'S NICE TO THINK THAT SOMEONE IS READING.... AN IMPOSSIBILITY BUT HYPOTHETICALLY POSSIBLE!